


Snowblind

by typhe



Series: Snowblind [1]
Category: Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Captivity, Dubious Consent, Hatesex, LHM, M/M, Psychological Trauma, Rival Relationship, Self-Harm, Torture, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-27
Updated: 2012-09-06
Packaged: 2017-10-28 06:29:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/304752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typhe/pseuds/typhe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU.  Unable to defeat his enemy, Vanyel agrees to negotiate with Leareth.  They have few illusions about the other's desires; Leareth wants to steal Vanyel's power and turn him into a thrall, and Vanyel wants to kill Leareth and neutralise his vast army. In the hope of obtaining those goals, either might be persuaded to give a little ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> AU that splits off from Magic's Price somewhere around ch 17.
> 
> Warnings, for the whole fic; dubcon/noncon/sexual abuse, self-harm and suicidal ideation, torture, tons of blood.
> 
> I originally had this down as 'Explicit', but it doesn't really belong there; there's only one sex scene, and it's not that colourful.

The burning energy stayed with him after they were all dead and the air was filled with the scent of charred flesh and lit by their smouldering, undergrowth too cold and damp to spread the flames - not that Vanyel would have cared. He took what he could find of his possessions, stared numbly at the saddle and left it untouched, and loped away down their trail. He held the wild-death energy as if it were a snake between his fingers, trying to bite into his mind - blood-red and burning so hot he couldn't feel his own channels.

He ran for as long as he could, feeding off that bestial magic to keep his wounded body moving. He stopped only once there was nothing left and he could barely feel the carnage any more, and he heaved cold air in gulps, too tired even to retch.

So cold. And nauseatingly dizzy, as if the earth had crumbled beneath him and left him tumbling forever through the void. He looked for more energy, for his mind's-shelter, childlike fumbling to fill his needs, and his tendrils in the blackness found nothing.

 _She's - not there. She's dead. Oh gods, Yfandes is_ dead. _They -_ He flailed back through the hours with his feelings, remembering his mental imprisonment and the hideous, draining weakness. _She was dying, all that time. They leeched her strength and - killed her - slowly, and -_ the image of her severed tail crossed his mind and he stumbled onto his knees. _She was still alive when they_ mutilated _her and then -_ He sensed his body trying to sob or to retch and he could do nothing, only lay his head down against the snow.

_It was my fault. I should have let her rest - should have brought allies - should have waited at the guardpost with Stef -_

The thought of Stefen was too much to bear, and he felt himself pull his mind inside, away from, his shuddering body and all its crimes, and he floundered inside his mind, tried to cauterise the rended bond. Assessing the damage was far easier than trying to think about it. He closed up the places where they'd always touched, rerouting lines that had flowed from one of them to the other. _Bleeding and useless, and alone -_ she would never, ever be there when he reached out to her again.

It was all over. Everything he'd cared about. His fault.

 _I'm not a Herald any more. I'm not Yfandes's Chosen, not Savil's nephew, not Stefen's lover. Not anything._ He pulled the ice around his mind, and curled up in the snow.

 

_He rolled to his feet and looked up into the sky. No moon, no stars or stormclouds - only a smooth grey that felt strangely like coming home. Between him and that nothingness stretched steep walls of stone - or glass - or ice. He was in the base of a chasm, and there was no way he could climb out, and he had only a ghost of memory of ever being afraid of whatever was down here - or hopeful for the promise awaiting him above. He knew he'd run, once; now, he'd seemingly dived._

_The remains of a fire were heaped in the snow by his feet. A few embers hanging on in the cold, devoid of real warmth. Apart from that, he might have been in some depth that no human had ever visited - there was nothing to be seen in either direction but the uneven, snow-covered floor of rock or ice, gradually rising in both directions._

_He was at a nadir in the passage. From here, it was uphill either way. He tested the contours of his mind, and found himself as incapable as he'd first been here; he had no magical gifts to cheat his way out with, only his own self._

_He picked his direction and scrambled along the crevasse. He raised a hand to the wall to steady himself, and he felt its cold bite into his touch. A thin trail of blood ran from his fingertips and painted the ice red as he walked, but when he glanced back - the dead fire now out of sight - the mark wasn't red, but blue._

_He wasn't afraid. He had nowhere further to fall, nothing else to be robbed of, not even hope. Springtime was now far away, or never._

 

He assessed himself instantly as he returned to awareness - muscles aching, a collection of wounds still tingling with the aftereffects of healing, reserves close to empty; he'd rarely been less combat-ready. On top of that, the bitter cold barely even registered.

Someone was watching his mind.

He rolled onto hands and feet, hoping that what little he had left would be enough. He extended his mental senses in an arrowpoint, ready to withdraw behind his shields at a moment's notice.

He encountered intelligence - equal to his own, but dramatically different. Not hostile. _:Show yourself,:_ he demanded.

A kyree raised itself to its feet in the snow-covered scrub. Vanyel relaxed; he'd not seen a kyree since his last visit to K'Treva Vale, but he had never heard of them attacking without reason. This one was large, and evidently mind-gifted; definitely a Thoughtsenser, probably also a Farseer if his sleeping reflexes were any judge. He also realised that _he_ should be the one on the defensive; he had unwittingly strayed onto his observer's land. He offered a wordless apology for this trespass, hoping that maybe the beast would realise he was no threat and let him be.

 _:It's no matter,:_ came words of reply. _:But you are not safe here. You are injured - you leave a trail of minds-blood.:_

The expression was unfamiliar to him, but he took its meaning well enough and he examined the damaged edges of his mind-shields; he'd left them open in places that he was used to 'Fandes covering, and he cursed his stupidity as he knotted the protections back into place. _:Thanks for the advice,:_ he replied stiffly. _:I'll move on a little less conspicuously now.:_

The kyree studied him, and he felt its powerful, territorial curiosity exploring his presence and his path. _:The unclean folk in the woods to the south - you killed them.:_ It sounded more respectful, if anything, and Vanyel nodded numbly. He felt his mind shy from the thought of of that filthy charnel-house but now the images had come, he couldn't shut them out again, and he looked down into the snow. There was something _wrong_ in his memory, something unplaceable among the other horrors. He tried to pull himself together and focus on the creature in front of him. _:Do you need directions? Or shelter?:_

Vanyel knelt, and then stood. _:No. I'm heading due north, into the mountains. And I've slept enough for now.:_ The creature sniffed, and Vanyel knew he'd been impolite but he could hardly spare the time for diplomatic discourse. _:Thank you for the warning,:_ he added.

It acknowledged his gratitude with a nod of its head. _:Go safely. I shall have to speak to the Winged One of this.:_

Van pursed his lips - from what he knew, kyree were not unlike hive insects in their ability to build and communicate and in their devotion to their queens; and 'Winged One' indicated a profoundly gifted matriarch. They were also very secretive; he'd had no idea of there being such a queen anywhere close to Valdemar's borders. _Hope my vrondi aren't troubling her - likely not, given how strange their magic is._ He turned north as the kyree ran away, but glanced behind him. His mind felt pulled back to that nameless place where they'd dragged him and...

He walked faster, almost running, momentum keeping him upright. He'd deal with it later. Or never. Didn't matter just so long as they were all _dead_ -

His stride faltered, and his eyes screwed shut. All the dead. He'd stood among them, _spoken_ to them. Lavished cruelty on the worst of them, ransacked the mind of the cleverest and -

_\- killed every one._

He could see them now, an unconsidered detail at the corner of his mind. Two people he'd killed just for being in front of him. A servant-boy, and a herbalist who, he knew for sure, had healed the worst of his wounds.

_Oh gods no. How could I?_

He carried on slowly, head bowed. _And if she wasn't dead she should have disowned me for that_ , he thought bitterly. _Worthless. Mindless. Not even able to control what I've got left. No wonder I'm alone._

 _No wonder he stayed behind at the Border. I don't even deserve to_ look _at him, not ever again._

 

Vanyel had the luck to find a shallow cave to serve as shelter overnight. He built himself a fire and something that bore a primal resemblance to a bed, and curled up tightly under his cloak. He stared at the fire for as long as he could, as if a little warmth and a few embers could keep him from his memories and his nightmares and the thoughts of all he'd lost. He realised, bitterly, that he'd better get used to sleeping alone if he was going to sleep at all ever again.

 

_He looked behind, and couldn't see his own footprints. He started up the slope again, wondering with each turn in the path if the walls were getting any lower, the sky any closer. After a candlemark or so of climbing, he heard a sound above._

_Rhythmic. Like drumming, or marching. While he was trapped here, someone above was going to war._

_He ran, scurrying on hands and knees when he had to, over drifts full of pointed rocks and through slicks of half-frozen water. The sky never changed, and the sounds become louder, and then faded. He_ had _to get up there. He didn't pause until he was exhausted, and then he stumbled against the wall, feeling bruised inside and out._

_There was a soft sound behind him. Snow shifting._

_He turned, bringing both arms up around his head, ready to defend himself if necessary. But then a figure rounded the path, and he slumped, gasping, shocked - but not afraid. "'Lendel," he breathed. "How - what are you_ doing _here?"_

 _But he was. Tylendel - red-faced and with snowflakes clinging to his hair, and otherwise no different to how he'd seemed in the grove Vanyel had dreamt months ago. His head spun. In all its recent iterations,_ Stefen _had been beside him in the ice dream - but he couldn't think of Stef. He_ couldn't _. Tylendel crouched beside him, panting. "You - you crazed idiot, I've been trying to catch up with you."_

 _Van shivered, and found he was regarding Tylendel with an uncontrolable wariness. He remembered the first times he'd dreamed of Tylendel - how he'd_ had _to run away from his touch. Why did he feel like that all over again? He loved 'Lendel, didn't he? "What is this?" he choked out, not even sure he knew quite what he was asking._

_Tylendel sighed. "I've been here before. That was a long time ago now, but I had to come back to help you. It's not..." He trailed off, and Van continued to stare at him, hopelessly confused. "Ever heard someone say that hell is other people? That's not true. Hell is ourselves, and that's where we are."_

_"I'm dead, then?" He didn't_ feel _dead, in the space outside this dream. Dead might have brought some relief._

 _"No. Not yet. I have to get you out while there's still time to_ live _, Van. But there's a way. It's all changed now."_

_"What has?" he asked, frustrated._

_"Your fate," said Tylendel. "This dream reflects your fate - it always has. Anything important that changes for you will have an effect in here too."_ Stef. _Oh great gods, Stefen had been_ here _beside him and now he was gone and - Van looked away, feeling a stab of shame go through his heart. What had he ruined now?_

_"There's a way out?" he prompted, desperate._

_"I'll help you get there. It's -" he paused, and Vanyel couldn't help but note that while his own breath steamed in the air, 'Lendel's did not. "It's not easy, but it's easier than the way I got out. You're alive and you've got less you need to give up than I did. And I'll stay with you, I promise."_

_"What do you -?"_

_"Van, please, not now. I'll explain properly later. For now, you need to wake up."_

 

It was mid-morning. His body had shifted, extremities seeking the thin sunlight. Tylendel had been right - he'd slept far too long and if there were still bandits prowling after him this shallow shelter could easily become a tomb. He sat up slowly, joints feeling like they'd turned to stone. He tried to understand - Tylendel, telling him to _give up?_ He'd always felt the ice-dream was real; that was why he'd run from it, in the past. To have it suddenly cast him to a new and literal depth - not even able to join that battle he'd once been terrified of being a part of - was not something he was ready to deal with.

That dream had always come whether he was ready for it or not. He shivered, and pulled his cloak back around himself.

He gathered his meagre belongings and crawled out of his hiding-place; after the wander through that thin dreamspace, the open stone of the hills felt exposing, and he tried to keep under the sparse trees. He kicked the crust off a snowbank beside him and dipped his tin cup into its soft interior, hoping his hands might melt it enough that he could wash away the residual filth in his throat.

He pressed on northwards, pushing his pace in spite of his injuries. But the path would have been hard even if it weren't blocked by snow, and he found himself having to make significant detours to get around obstacles that should have been minor. He kept going into the evening, fuelling his journey with anger and with magic he carefully siphoned from nearby nodes. His channels ached with the effort of his protections, still ragged from what he'd done the day before. But he had to drink as deeply as he could, while he still could, and without his presence being directly noticeable. A very close observer could have seen the power in each node seep down a little, but he doubted his enemy would be so petty.

It was shortly after sundown when he reached Crookback Pass. He'd been expecting a murderous goat-trail; what he saw was a smooth channel cut into the solid rock. He paused, dazed.

He thought of the crevasse of his recent dreams, but that had been a rough scar compared to this perfect incision in the stone. This was completely deliberate, wheras the recent alteration of his inner landscape had seemed much more like a matter of geological accident. Its length staggered him - the endpoint was so far away that it escaped his vision. He pulled off one of his gloves and touched his hand to the sheer rock wall, and felt the residue of its maker's power, a needlepoint sting beneath the glasslike flat surface.

It was intimidating. _It's meant to be intimidating. This is how powerful he is. He used all this power just to make it quicker and easier for him to kill us. This is so far beyond me - I couldn't beat him in a fair fight even if he came at me alone._ He looked down that polished gauntlet, feeling the power in the cold air prickle his eyes. _It won't be long before he brings his thrall army through here. A month, at most. Not enough time left to waste. I should -_

\- He looked back into the forest behind him. If he'd known how serious Master Dark's plans were, or how soon he intended to execute them, he would never have come alone. He would have still _wanted_ to - Savil's death had filled him with a savage need to take this kill himself, without anyone else getting their hands stained - but tactically, he could not have condoned it. His speed to the border had been pitiful and a battalion would have travelled little slower, and he could surely have done with that battalion. Or several. He wondered, in passing, how many bandit gangs were still out there looking for him.

But there were others out there who could still aid him if he raised the alarm. The Guards at their border-post. Maybe even the kyree and their allies. Could he contact a Mindspeaker at a relay station further south? _Gods no, I can't waste the strength and I'm not inflicting my mind-touch on_ anyone _right now._ He realised, coldly, that now he was no longer bound to Yfandes they might not even be open to his contact. But could he spare a few days to walk back to the border-post and -

He laid his face against the stone beside him. Yes, Stefen might still be there. More likely he had already headed back to Haven. Either way, it was the _last_ thing that should be permitted to affect Vanyel's decision. He pushed the thoughts - memories - black tangles of emotion - under the ice. His argument with Stefen was of no relevance to the decision; should he make contact, or should he continue?

A lone assassin in the mountains, hungry and desolate and casting ice-statues in his mind. He'd made his mistakes long past, and there was no way to undo them and little he could do to mitigate them. Too late to bring his own army or even to keep Stefen beside him - _no_. He stared at the layer of snow on the path behind -

His eyes met another's, crystal-blue and wondering.

He started. How long had it - _she_ \- been there? He slipped back out of the dizzying pass and dropped to his knees in the snow, eyes now level with hers. "What brings you here?" he asked softly.

 _:You do:_ , she replied. The mindspeech link she offered to him was a little less gentle than a human's might have been - something like a grasping claw, barbed with information; her identity, that of her people. Hyrryl was as gifted as Aroon had implied and she was mother and leader to a powerful clan. He tentatively returned the handshake, while keeping his own surface thoughts as shielded as possible. _:Aroon told me of your journey. We have a gift for you.:_ She shifted her pose and revealed a small clutch of rabbit carcasses - roughly skinned, and they looked to have been boiled, though by what means Vanyel had no idea. He exhaled hard, grateful and suddenly full of physical hunger.

Gods, he hadn't even _thought_ about eating, and any kind of food would have been hard to come by here. "Thank you," he said. "To what do I owe this favour?"

 _:I know a little of your kind, Herald.:_ He didn't correct her. _:You only leave your warm southlands when trouble comes nearby. Trouble I wish to know more of.:_

He sighed. "There's a powerful mage hiding somewhere in the mountains. He's been massing an army to attack Valdemar, but he wants to kill me first."

_:And I see he has tried to do just that.:_

She had the aura of a healer, and he knew what she meant by her measuring look over his creaking body. "He's not the first," he assured her, old scars and numbness making him a little arrogant. "And he won't get past me."

She tilted her lupine head. _:Your determination does you credit, but I think your chances will improve with rest and recuperation. My domain is not so far from here. If you'll accompany me there, I can shelter you, and you may take as much time as you need to recover.:_

He swayed in his crouch at even the thought of accepting her offer, and the protection that came with it. But he couldn't - there was nowhere safe for him while his enemy lived, never could be. "There's no time," he told her. "I can't go with you. But I'll remember your kindness," he said, hoping it would be enough to satisfy her after, he assumed, travelling many hours out of her way for no better reason than to speak her piece.

She shook her head, and scuttled forward, laying a gentle paw on his knee. He felt her make him one more offering - healing for his aching muscles and joints, delivered more subtly than he'd ever known that gift to be before - and then she turned and ran back into the woods. Within seconds he couldn't see her, or even sense her.

Feeling no other potential disturbances, he jointed a rabbit with a small knife and ate it down to the bone. He tore a strip of cloth from the end of his ragged shirt and bound the rest by their heels, and tied them to his pack; then levered himself slowly back on his feet. He left the carcass where it lay, as if he were a wolf himself, and looked down the pass once more.

He had no intention of resting, or being caught, or turning back. Intimidation meant nothing once one had nothing left to lose.

He walked along the mage-hewn road. Sometimes, he touched his hand to the walls, feeling that thrum of twisted power, like a heartstone cut wrong.

 

Close to the end of the pass, he saw another road veering further upward - the end of the mountain road he'd expected he'd have to use. Its descent from the heights was steep, and Vanyel ran up it on hands and feet, wanting some vantage on the meadow below.

There were, as he'd expected, a pair of watchmen posted at the nearest edge, and what seemed to be another set on its furthest corner. Apart from that, he saw nothing but the ridge of mountains beyond.

 _The Ice Wall_. Nothing but shadows under the half-moon. Vanyel could have been at the end of the world.

He pondered the problem of the watchmen. He felt a vestige of lethal anger quiverring in his chest, but he intended to pass quietly. He recalled that he still had no evidence that his enemy even knew how to defend against mind-magic, and he tentatively examined the nearer pair of soldiers. He found confidence there; they were treated well, and equipped well too, though he was unsurprised to see a block set upon the will of both. So they were spellbound, and he definitely couldn't beat both of them in a physical fight in his current condition. But between the high moon and their self-satisfaction he had a better idea.

He exerted a thread of Empathy and lapped it against the edge of their auras. _:It's safe tonight. You can sleep. Your compatriot will be watching. And you're tired. This road doesn't need two sets of eyes, or even one. It's time to sleep now. No one will know.:_

He tiptoed past them minutes later. That wasn't something he would have thought to do with Empathy himself, not until Stefen had taken to using the Bardic gift to lull him back to sleep after the worst of his nightmares - and he took that memory and crushed it away in the back of his mind. A tool was just a tool, no matter how he'd learned to use it. He walked across the expanse of snow that was cupped in the tiny valley, keeping to the trails already taken by the sentries. Now he was in the open, the wind caught at his hair and shifted the dry snow around his feet. He could feel stubby grass beneath it; this place was among the poorest of goat-pastures, barely enough to support a handful of families. How could an _army_ come from this land? Perhaps his dreams were wrong, and his enemy was simply a lone madman. But he daren't cling to that hope.

He looked down the road from the other guardpost, ignoring the two men asleep at his feet. He could see little except the pale light on the gravel path that ran down the hillside, but the air that drifted up from the valley smelt wrong - too acrid, too smoky. He extended a ghost-finger of Farsight and tried to see the place below as if he walked through it in day.

He caught his breath. There _had_ once been a goat-hamlet below him but it had been smothered completely by - he trembled - a nest of war. The trees had been cleared, and the frozen earth was churned as if by hundreds of feet and hooves. There were foundries and factories, bare rock cracked by hammers. Flimsy barns where workers - thralls - were chained in their sleep. He saw weapons lay where power lay, in overlooking towers. A wall contained a pack of _something_ ; half-wolves, half-warhorses. This was...worse than he'd expected. A massing of Northmen, he could have dealt with, even negotiated with. This was a whole land turned to militarisation, kept alive for nothing else.

And there was a rise beside the river that, in an eerily normal pattern of construction, had a temple built atop it; it had once been the small but beating centre of a normal mountain village, but now it was bulked up and fortified, steeples become ebony watchtowers by a process as twisted as that which had made the pass. Beneath it was a node; large, and oblivious to its cruel construction. He chose not to tap it; knowing it may have been trapped in some fashion. Enough to know that it was there.

Vanyel swallowed hard. He knew enough of how blood magic worked - _how many prisoners died to make your keep? And if you have an entire mountain tribe in your power, what else will you do?_ An icicle of fear stabbed through his defences - not for his life, which was already forfeit, but for the fate of his vendetta.

Death had always been an option and even a likelihood; failure never had. He _had_ to kill this man. He let the hate seethe back to the surface, its passion reinforcing his boldness. He hurried down the road, looking for a new place to hide and to plot.

He settled in the corner of a wall that he thought had once been a wind-shelter for animals, and considered the situation. He couldn't establish a camp anywhere near this area, and if he wanted real rest he'd have to head back to the kyree; he cursed himself silently, but took the time to strip another rabbit with his knife. At least his objective was simple. One kill, nothing more.

He should also be glad he'd travelled as quickly as he had. They weren't ready to march to war yet, and if he killed their leader now then surely they never would. All he needed was one good shot at his enemy, but how? He couldn't simply wait; they'd find him, unless he used magical concealment, which at this range would be easily detectable. There was nowhere to lay an ambush on this side of the pass.

He spared a moment of thought for his dreams; they had been _so_ like the pass, sometimes, but on recent nights he had walked below the battle. What had he done? Missed his chance to intervene? 'Lendel said his fate had changed, but not if it were for the better or the worse. He closed his eyes, confused and tired. What else had he ever dreamed about? The dark one had _spoken_ to him, asked him to -

 _Yes. That. That's what the dreams were always trying to tell me; he doesn't_ want _to take me on directly. He's got much less to gain from a fight than I have. He's already failed to trap me, and next he's going to try to talk me out of it._

 _Which will be another trap._ He took another look at his own shields, tapping his tiny knife against his hand; now he knew what that foul substance had done to him, it was easy to ensure that he could never again be so helpless as to let anyone -

_\- never - no -_

_\- don't touch me, I -_

The void in his mind opened up again.

 

_"Van - breathe, Van -" 'Lendel's voice was warm against his ear and Vanyel flung himself sideways, gasping and sobbing and desperate to evade the touch. "It's me, it's -" Doesn't matter who any more. He lay on his side, pressing his forearms together. They throbbed, a strange mix of ice and flame, and he wasn't even sure if he was awake or dreaming._

_He forced himself to look up and saw Tylendel wisely keeping his distance. "Don't touch me," he hissed._

_'Lendel's voice was trying to shake him, trying to warn him. "Van, this isn't right. Look at yourself."_

_He did, and found he was streaked with his own blue blood; he shuddered, and pressed his bleeding arm against his chest, against his own lips, trying to staunch the flow, swallow it, ice and iron in his mouth, salt and burning hurt returning to remind him that he was still horribly, unbearably alive. Not right, never, but it was what was. He couldn't fight what had already happened to him with a knife. Stupid to try. What the hell_ had _he been doing?_

_'Lendel shuffled closer again, his shadow blotting out the sky above. "I remember this," he said sadly._

_"Remember what?" he muttered around his arm._

_"The first night I came to you. You were dreaming this, and you..." Vanyel remembered - of course he remembered - the spikes in the ice, the trap he'd been in. Cutting his arms on the shards when he couldn't go on and couldn't feel any more..._

_Just his fool imagination, and he rolled over, trapping his hands below his body in the snow. He'd only_ dreamed _he'd cut his arms that night so long ago, like a child wanting someone to heal them. It had taken 'Lendel's death to drive him to draw out a knife for real. And other deaths. Other problems. And out there he'd set his back to the wall with a skinning-blade in his hands and he'd had some foolish fit and_ what _had he done?_

 _He trembled against the earth. He'd do anything to prevent 'Lendel from touching him again. Anything. 'Lendel, who he_ loved _, far more than he'd ever loved anyone but Stef._

_"What happened to me?" he whispered._

_"You're still hurting," said 'Lendel. "You'll go on hurting until you give yourself time to let it happen. You haven't even mourned her, have you?" Vanyel stilled and curled his legs up, feeling selfish and cruel and inhuman. No, he hadn't had_ time. _"Any part of this would be too much, Van, and you're trying to take it on all at once without even letting yourself feel. Of course you're hurting yourself." It was as accusing as it was compassionate and he - couldn't - bear - that._

_He lay still, not even knowing what he could do beyond staying quiet until 'Lendel went away and the pain faded. As the minutes passed, he realised that neither of those things was going to happen._

_He rolled over onto his side. He wasn't leaking blood any more, but he could still feel the prickling feeling of the skin under his shirt icing over. "Alright," he said softly. "What do I need to do?"_

_"It's not a challenge, Van -"_

_"Then what is it?" 'Lendel sighed at him, warm and completely exasperated. "Do you_ know _what's going to happen out there? I can't let him, 'Lendel. I can't let him do this. I can't let him_ live _."_

 _"What happens here isn't about him. It's about_ you _\- he didn't do that to you, did he?" Vanyel wanted to retort that yes he_ did _, he'd had Savil killed, and his gang had killed Yfandes and they'd - they'd - He screwed his eyes closed. Oh gods, 'Lendel,_ shut up. _"You_ need _to let go," 'Lendel said again, and he felt anger twisting in his throat, anger left helpless to do anything except cause hurt. What in the hells was 'Lendel thinking, telling him to 'let go'?_

 _He opened one eye, and found himself staring at the snow crystals on his own eyelashes. "Didn't you say_ you _-"_

_"Eventually. I had a lot to deal with," said Tylendel, voice suddenly muted as if speaking from some depth of his own. "It wasn't quick, or easy. I'm - still sorry, you know?" His voice was suddenly closer, and Van realised Tylendel was stooping over him. "I didn't realise how much I hurt you - I didn't mean to. I thought that if I only wanted to hurt the 'right' people, everything else would be alright - and it wasn't. I'm sorry, Van, and I hope I can help you back before you make the same mistake."_

Too late. _Too late, and - "He still has to die," said Vanyel into the snow._

_"If that's all you care about..." Tylendel sounded upset again, and Van felt a prickling of hate toward himself because he'd never made Tylendel upset before. "It'll be easier to go back, at this point. Find the kyree. Get word to the south and then do what you always meant to."_

_"Fight him in the pass, you mean?" That had been his fate, his life's lodestone; but he'd solved this same riddle once before. "Easier for_ who _?"_

_'Lendel's voice softened, and Vanyel knew he was as unable to lie as any other Messenger. "For the both of you. You and Leareth. You'll find peace, and he'll find...another chance."_

_"Then I'm staying," he said firmly. "Whatever it takes."_

 

It was the howling of the wolf-mounts that woke him. Gods, what _stupidity_. There he was, not a crows-eye mile from them, spilling his own blood on the earth. He examined the wound; blessedly much smaller in reality, and it must have stopped bleeding an hour ago, but now they had his scent there'd be no escaping from them. He healed himself clumsily, cursing.

Whatever he was going to do, he had to decide upon it fast. He pushed away 'Lendel and the cobwebs of confusion, but tried to keep the muddled dream-insight to hand. He touched the skin around his wound, aware of a strange clarity. He didn't _feel_ mad any more; his thoughts seemed tempered by their own fire, fast and as precise as his knife, and sharper. Yes, he had weaknesses to cover and wounds to hide. But all that meant was that none of his enemy's tricks would be allowed to work twice.

Vanyel couldn't win this conflict that his enemy didn't even want to have. Stalemate. But he also couldn't escape their coming meeting, not any more. Running would be futile as well as counter to his goal. So...

_Stop running. If he wants to try to talk me to death, he's more than welcome. I'll take any offer from him that gives me more time to gather the resources I need to kill him._

He heard another round of baying, and a human voice. Oh gods, it couldn't be much longer. He reached back to the nodes in the mountains, no longer bothering to hide his tracks. His preparations were rapid, but thorough; a spell-trap on the road below him, a simple visual concealment for himself, a clutch of spell-weapons. He wasn't going to start this conversation with niceties. He breathed fast, cold air stinging his throat. He could hear their hooves on the road, and he covered his head with his arms and waited for the explosion. _Breathe, you fool -_

He cowered for a few still moments, thinking of 'Lendel in the split inside the ice. So - _different_ ; 'Lendel had never been so patient, or seemed so wise to the ways of fate -

The air turned red.

He dodged a shower of stones and rolled out into the open, looking for more targets. There had been eight black-clad men on horseback, and three of them were dead - he threw fire at another two, and felt most of his power deflected by a shield. Hasty work and brittle. He beat against it with pure power, and felt it crack, and he lashed a fell mount down by its ankles. His own shields took a blow, and he rose to his feet feeling reinforcement flow from the nodes to the south of him. _Go on, I can stay here all day. What do_ you _have?_

He felt two of the soldiers circling behind him, and - _like carving with a dream_ \- he ripped open the earth with a tendril of Fetching, hoping to panic the blood-maddened Changebeasts. He thought he heard one throw its rider, and the other never saw the lightning coming.

One left. Right in front of him. A mage, but no match for him, and Vanyel pushed a spike of power through a crack in his shield and watched it shatter. The mage and his mad horse immolated together, and he dropped to a crouch, breathing the cold air below the layer of smoke.

"Impressive."

 _Petty_ , Vanyel thought coldly in return; the voice was amplified through the smoke with a cantrip. After all the games and gestures he wasn't surprised that his opponent was playing this for theatre. He extended his mind - more presences, more targets, dozens this time, a harder skirmish but not impossible; but the ambush of days ago hung over him. How many more did he want to kill? How much more could they even do to him?

'Lendel had been right, he realised. It would have been _much_ easier if he'd run back to the pass, whatever the outcome. They spread out around him, and the primitive killer in him wished for higher ground.

Their leader stepped out, and the smoke cleared. Parlour tricks. Vanyel rose from his combat crouch an inch at a time, measuring him with his eyes. Master Dark was beautiful, with an uncanny symmetry that made Vanyel sure that he'd Changed himself. And elegant; his clothing black and cut to mock Vanyel's ripped and broken Whites or to put them to shame. He was smiling. Of course he was. "Why do you bother with this nonsense? You are quite alone, Herald-Mage Vanyel -"

"I know," he interrupted roughly. "And I know who you are." The name had been planted in his dreams, a dark star in the centre of all voids. " _Leareth_ -"

"Darkness. Yes. I quite consciously chose that _Tayledras_ name. Hence 'Master Dark' as well. A quaint conceit, don't you think? As are my servants."

He spared the ring of men a glance; they looked much the same as the people he'd already killed, all masked in black iron. Vanyel knew of only two types of madman; those who were convinced that they were good, and those who tried to be as bad as possible. "Very clever." Their ranks were pressed tight together; no way out.

"You need not remain alone, Vanyel." It was half-threat, half-pledge. "You need only give over this madness - stretch out your hand to me, join me, take my Darkness to you. You will never be alone again. Think how much we could accomplish together! We are so very similar, we two, in our powers - and in our pleasures." Vanyel felt his eyes widen, his arms lift defensively, as Leareth stepped towards him, moving like the scorched earth was his ballroom, feet gliding over the grass. _He's_ flirting _with me._ It was incredible, and mortifying. "Or if you prefer," and Leareth's voice dropped, as if down into the depths of Vanyel's spine, "I could even bring your long-lost love to you. Think about it, Vanyel - think of Tylendel, once more alive and at your side. He could share our life and our power, Vanyel, and nothing, _nothing_ would be able to stand against us."

He stepped back, and somehow he kept from trembling. 'Lendel in the ice - 'Lendel under the belltower - He locked his knees, forced his mind to focus. Could he take the kill here and now? Vanyel tested Leareth; shielding as close to perfect as he'd ever seen, and - he was connected to the node under his keep, and more besides, connected via others - other mages kept in thrall - no. Oh, _no_. He couldn't kill Leareth. _If she'd been here with me and been willing to die with me..._

He cast that feeling out with all his others. If they fought, he couldn't win, and would most likely die. But Leareth _didn't want to fight_ , whether from fear of the same calculations or some part of his non-reason, here he was _asking_ Vanyel to stay alive. Not for anything good. Vanyel wouldn't have believed a word of his ridiculous offer even if he'd wanted to, but it would keep him alive.

And even the thought of that life filled him with mute terror.

 _He's_ flirting. _He wants_ me.

In some memory far behind him he felt Krebain's footsteps.

Krebain was the first man he'd killed, and the second man he'd kissed. He'd realised, in the minutes between that touch and that sickening death that he _couldn't_ ever sleep with a man he felt contempt for. He couldn't give himself sexually to someone so hateful, no matter what favour he was offered in return.

Krebain's claw against his face. Vanyel, standing before Leareth, felt nothing. He couldn't remember ever feeling anything. _I can't give myself to -_ It was a numb recitation, substanceless, an empty memory. Vanyel had nothing left to lose.

 _There's nothing left of me to_ give _. They took all of it. At his orders._

Leareth was ten times Krebain and Vanyel was half the mage he'd been only days ago. He could not kill the man where he stood. He didn't care for his life, or his body, and shouldn't be capable of fear. He wasn't a Herald and had no duties left except for revenge. By any means. He couldn't _care_.

And the gods knew it wasn't one of his better qualities but Vanyel was nothing if not a resourceful killer. He knew he couldn't kill Leareth now but if he lived to escape this dark circle then surely he would find a way to kill him _later_.

By any means.

_Nothing left to give._

"Well?" said Leareth.

"Yes," said Vanyel.

_You can fuck my empty shell._


	2. Chapter 2

Leareth's mouth opened in an angelic smile. Vanyel felt like he had just thrown his heart down onto the frozen ground, dead while the rest of him lived on for a while, and he set his hand behind his back and bowed politely to his enemy; it was a courtly gesture, the kind made between those of equal rank - not, never, the formal supplication he offered only to Randale. _Not that these barbarians would know the difference._

To his great surprise the gesture was returned. Leareth's dark eyes locked with Vanyel's, and he felt little direct menace, only a sort of eager curiosity. It was as if Vanyel had agreed to dance with him, and perhaps he had; his mind spun from role to role, courtier, negotiator, assassin, courted - somehow, he had to gain control of the situation again.

 _Start with the formalities; they buy time._ "I am obliged by your magnanimity, and I would suggest that we retire to discuss the terms of this agreement in more detail." He added no title; Leareth was unlikely to use one that Vanyel would be prepared to recognise. They didn't claim this land but Leareth claimed more, everything.

The smile faltered for a second; Vanyel was standing before him in rags, his hair torn and matted, face half-violet and with a patch of barely-dried blood coated over the left side of his body; Leareth might just as well have expected Vanyel to grow a second head as to lapse into diplomatic discourse, and Vanyel felt himself regain a shard of his confidence. "Whatever you desire," Leareth said after a moment's pause. "You will find I can be generous, and hospitable."

"I've no doubt," Vanyel replied smoothly, casting his eyes around the blasted valley. He waited as Leareth barked commands in a northern dialect he found he could half-understand, and he spread his feet to prevent himself from swaying. He felt vertigo under his clarity, an unknowable dark below the thin ice of his decision. He reminded himself that he hadn't had a _choice_ \- if he wanted anything to come of whatever few days of life might be left to him, this was the only path open to him and he was bound to go wherever it led. If he fell, may it not be in vain. The soldiers closed in on him, and he stood up straight, not letting them touch him, not letting them move him; he tried to meet the eyes of several, and felt vindicated when they looked away. He could have killed any number of them. He let them hate him, as best their captive minds allowed.

Soon, they brought him a horse - a _real_ horse, a mountain-mare bred for hard terrain and harder winters. She was, predictably, black, and she too avoided his eyes. The balance of her walk seemed odd to Vanyel, and he suspected that her physiology had somehow been Changed to suit her master's purposes. Much as Leareth had Changed himself - it unsettled Vanyel, not simply because of the vain waste of power it represented but because it told him how little respect Leareth had for the natural way of the world around him. What was Tayledras in him felt revolted, and his need to kill keened inside him, hating what Leareth had done, what he was.

Vanyel forced himself to stay awake as his mount was led down the mountain, hemmed in by marchers each side. The horse was uncannily docile, and he decided against trying to touch her mind - the potential horror wasn't worth his unmasking it. The settlement below was silent, but he explored it with his eyes; its outlines told of a much larger village than this land could possibly support under normal circumstances, and the scent of industry only intensified as they drew closer. His hopes sank at the certainty that Leareth was prepared for a long hard war. Valdemar was not. And with the residual sense of having once been someone who had the heart to consider such things, he thought of the tight-pressed sleepers whose sweat had built all this and whose blood had fuelled the construction; their presence would make any fight, any escape, much more complicated.

A rough stone path wound up the rise to the temple. It was a little more than sixty feet off the valley floor, and from above such rocky ground it presented a respectable defensive position, but Vanyel was sure that the stronghold hadn't been designed with siege in mind but rather pure grandeur. Perhaps he'd have the opportunity to see its black spires in daylight; their shadows told him enough of their false majesty. That it would have been a tricky target from the outside, if he'd had a couple of regiments to help him crack it open, was of little import now he was riding straight inside it and _quite alone. Adapt. New tactics; I'm going to bring him down from the inside._

The iron gates thudded closed behind him, and in the torchlight he saw Leareth gracefully dismount from the fell Changebeast he rode and step across to take Vanyel's reins. "There is much I wish to share with you." _And I you_ , he thought, running through everything he might do to end this man; _my knife and my fire, levinbolts and every furious element, my bare hands if I have to. But the gods know I'd rather not touch you._ He dismounted without replying and noted the place he'd been led to; the entrance to one of the great corner-towers. "Rest first. I pledge to you that no harm shall befall you in the night."

Vanyel became instantly more suspicious. He was incapable of believing that this man's honour was more than a game, a thing smithed to leech and kill like any of his other toys. But Vanyel couldn't bluff with empty hands - _fold, draw another hand._ "My thanks," he replied. "We must confer further in the morning."

Leareth nodded, satisfied. Confer, indeed. _If nothing else, it should be a pretty straightforward negotiation compared to most that I've been involved in._ They had few illusions about the other's desires; Leareth presumably wanted to steal Vanyel's power and turn him into a thrall, and Vanyel wanted to kill Leareth and neutralise his vast army. In the hope of obtaining those goals, either might be persuaded to give a little ground.

 

The tower had three storeys, and a staircase that wrapped around it and went all the way up to the turret above; all three rooms were windowless. He hadn't been locked in here - locks would prove little obstacle to him - but he could sense a huge complement of watchers, heavily armed men who probably had no other instruction than to prevent him from leaving this tower. It was a prison in obsidian, and there was little he could do but recoup as much as was possible before Leareth returned to trouble him in the morning.

The lowest was a bathing-chamber, the second, something that might have passed for either an audience room or a study, and the uppermost was a bedroom that put Vanyel's simple quarters in Haven to shame. The bed was a great nest of silk and goosedown, edged in purple brocade, and he thought of the crude places he'd lately slept and wished for them futilely, revulsion rising inside him again. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a wardrobe, which he chose to ignore.

A servant in a black parody of Court-garb had brought Vanyel fine food, and wine, and a pair of beautiful boys who looked to be in their mid-teens. He turned away all with equal lack of emotion. Wariness and myth and basic morality all made him disinclined to so much as _touch_ anything more than he had to. _I'll have to eat again sometime..._ Well, he'd worry about that when it was necessary. For now, he was investigating the tower's water-pipes; he followed their flow in his mind, to a boiler banked in the earth outside, and which he sensed was fuelled as much by magic as by coal -

That gave him pause. All the magic he'd sensed here was blood-tainted, and something as mundane as a spell for warming water had probably been fuelled from one of the enthralled mages he had seen feeding power to Leareth's mind, rather than the tyrant himself. _Can I really bear to use this? Why must he -_

 _No. It's not just the magic._ Leareth held this whole land and had turned its every soul to his own aggrandisement, miners as surely as mages. Any scrap of warmth here was made by slavery. Vanyel couldn't be here and not be complicit in it, but gods, could he hate and reject it, even as he took what he must of it. He sighed, and drank warm water from his cupped hands as the bathtub filled; the room clouded with steam, and he removed his filthy clothes and sank into the water, stewing with guilt.

His skin felt wrong. Everything did. Everything about even _having_ a body - _a vessel for weapons, a quiver. Only that. May as well keep it clean._ He hadn't bathed since his night at the Guardpost. What had happened the day after had already been burned away, frozen, buried, cast off, killed, and _still_ he shuddered while he scraped his skin clean.

He tried not to look back - all he'd see would be his own footsteps leading from one misjudgement to another, via pains caused entirely by his own errors. No, he shouldn't look, yet couldn't help but look. He knew better than to relax for a second - all he could do was scrabble for more energy and more time. He was still valuable only insofar as he could use the killing-powers inside him; in all other respects he was a walking corpse, destined to be lost without honour. And if he served his purpose, then the country he saved most likely would never come to know of it or anything else he'd said or done or had done to him -

 _Keep your mind in the present, you damned fool._ He dipped his head back in the water, and pulled at the knots in his hair. He felt a wet tendril catch on the wound on his arm, and hissed. So strange to even feel anything.

He took what relief he could find in the heat of the water before draining it, and then rinsed his clothes in the remainder left in the boiler. He wrung them out and carried them with him back up the stairs, noticing the fine hairs on his arms standing on end as he chilled again; he felt no particular discomfort.

He spread his rags flat on the floor and slid into the bed, and set a half-dozen magical alarums before he gave in to exhaustion. If Leareth wanted to have him killed where he lay, at least he'd be awake for it.

 

"Vanyel?"

The voice that he heard on his awakening made him sure that he was dreaming again, and he wondered why he couldn't see the changeless sky. But then he realised that his eyes were open. There was nothing to be seen in his tower room. Not a scrap of light.

There were footsteps, and then a rustle at the end of his bed. "Van? Still asleep in there? It's me."

Hearing his voice here didn't even make _sense_ and Vanyel's mind smouldered, furious and confused and more furious because of it; then he remembered what Leareth had promised him. A shudder ran through him, something cold and absolute that killed all his wonderment and all reason with it. He was _awake_ , and sitting up and waiting for another's hands to find his own.

Barely warm. He traced the backs of those hands, bones under dry skin, up to strong forearms and the soft flesh of the inside of his arms. The familiarity of the form - he remembered it _so_ well - tugged at the place where he'd once had a heart. Beneath it, a subtle tingle of magic.

 _Very subtle_ , he thought coldly. He pulled the stranger forward hard, and buried a hand in his hair. Wiry curls parted between his fingers, and he heard a warm gasp. _You're good. Very damned good._ "Miss me?" whispered Tylendel.

Vanyel snarled low, and shifted his hands to his adversary's face, feeling his way along perfect curled sideburns and finely replicated cheekbones. His mind raced free from his body, floating in the dark. He knew exactly what was going on and -

\- he wasn't going to stop it.

The last thing he needed was to hear another fucking word and so he kissed him. Cold and hungry and so hard that their teeth met, and he felt brittle ice in his spine, hardening him even as it numbed him. Reptile-hands against his naked body. He lay back, pulling his visitor above him, breaking the press of their lips to move lower, trace his teeth down that elegant throat.

 _You aren't perfect. It's easy to use magic to learn what a man looks like and sounds like, but you've no idea of the taste of him -_ Yet he was frozen inside, as if steadying himself with one hand to each side of the crevasse.

Those hands were exploring him still, gentle and firm and so alike to Tylendel's in gesture, so utterly necrotic in touch. _Did you once_ watch _us, is that what you're showing me?_ He felt his own anger beating inside his skull, a fist slamming against the ice walls. He let his tongue drift down to his enemy's chest, tip digging into muscles as if he were trying to find the gaps between the scales. _I could test you_ , he thought as the other's touch moved towards his numb centre. _So ''Lendel', what would you do if I told you to stop? What would you -_

He wrapped his mouth around a blood-flushed nipple, tongue and teeth exultant with hunger. The ice never swayed never cracked no way past no way to say no no _no I don't want this_ and he dropped down inside it. _So dark, not even a sky. And I'm - awake._

A hand closed around his cock and he heard himself moaning, felt himself rising into it. _I have to -_

 _Have to nothing, can't anything, oh gods this is_ real. _It's not him. But it's me. And it's Leareth. And it's me. I'm really -_ A knee slid between his thighs and he cried out. Another hand. He had to think. Had to speak, had to make a mage-light and see oh but _what_ would he see?

He couldn't cast the spell. He let Leareth embrace him again, turn his body over in the dark, press cold lips down his spine, Vanyel trembling under him. This wasn't making light. Wasn't making love. This was -

_\- making hate._

 

_Vanyel found himself below the even grey light, blinking, his pleasure already faded into the toneless snow. Alone, this time, and he decided he was glad of it. He sat on the ground and put his hand to his mouth, chewing at his knuckles in disgust._

_It was hours of runaway thinking, growing ever more chilled, before he heard Tylendel's footsteps. Vanyel looked up at him as he scrambled over the nearby rise, now assuming that this was simply another trap._

_'Lendel took a step back at the sight of Van's hostile expression. "Van, I -" He looked concerned, and a little hurt. "I'm sorry. That wasn't my fault. But I'm sorry."_

_"Who_ are _you?" he spat._

_Tylendel dropped to one knee, keeping his distance but holding Vanyel's eyes level. "You would know better than anyone. Probably better than me."_

_Well, that was true. He_ did. _However angry he was becoming in this nest of delusions and dreams, no one else's fantasies would ever be good enough to fool him. He sprang across the empty snow, tackled Lendel by the shoulders and kissed him as they fell into the snow._

_A moment of warmth was proof enough, and he pulled himself up again, leaving Tylendel sprawled on the ground. "I'd know," he agreed, lips stinging. He raised a hand to his mouth, and wasn't surprised or even fazed when he found that the blood at the corner of his lips wasn't red, but crystalline-blue. This settled it. It wasn't anyone's delusion but his own. That was his 'Lendel picking himself up from the ground, and not anyone else's._

_This triumph of reasoning only made him feel emptier. He'd had to do it, though. He'd decided upon it an hour ago, and taken like that -_ taken _, not requested or offered - the kiss hadn't hurt him._

_It had hurt 'Lendel, though. He knew he should feel guilty, but he couldn't feel anything much except anger. Lendel was sitting up, grunting slightly. "You could have told me you wanted..." He trailed off at Vanyel's warning look. "Right," he said softly. "Anything else you'd like to warn me about?"_

_"Go away."_

_"Rather be alone, huh?" Vanyel looked at him witheringly. "Van, I think we need to talk."_

_"I've nothing to say," he replied quickly._

_"Then what have you been thinking about all this time?" Van was silent. "I know what happened, Van, I'm not angry -"_

_"Then leave me alone." He knew how petty he sounded but Tylendel mustn't - no one should - he -_

_He turned his face against the wall of ice. If only he could do what he'd always planned to - kill Leareth and then die. No one should be trying to care for him any more, least of all 'Lendel. He wasn't worth it. Wasn't worth anything except..._

_He could feel Tylendel creeping close to him. Not trying to touch or to hurt, just to be near. "Van. I know you just did something that you wouldn't have wanted to do. It wasn't good for you, and it wasn't like you."_

_"It was necessary," he replied. "If I play along he's going to give me a chance to kill him."_

_"And until then, he'll do whatever he likes with you?" Vanyel dropped his head._ Yes _, he wanted to scream - that was the vise he was trapped in and there was nothing else he could_ do _but play along and look for Leareth's weaknesses, while knowing all the while that Leareth was doing the same to him. And the less he made sex seem like a weakness - which in any case it shouldn't be - the better._

 _But he couldn't_ say _it._

 _"Fine." 'Lendel sounded exasperated, to say the least. "But could you at least tell me what the hell you think_ he _was getting out of that performance?" Van looked up, startled. He hadn't thought about that. Or if he had, he'd assumed that Leareth simply liked to extract pleasure from the discomfort of others, and if Vanyel failed to express any such discomfort, he'd soon lose interest. That there was any other reason he'd choose to come to Vanyel in the guise of Tylendel hadn't crossed his mind._

 _But what if that wasn't the reason? What if - He glanced at 'Lendel's face, suddenly thinking of two different possibilities, both of which were unlikely in the extreme. "Either he thinks he can crack me with his lousy illusion," and he surely had_ some _awareness of the limits of even the best illusions, but the other possibility was almost too stupid to contemplate. "Or he's playing out a fantasy of what it would be like to be my lifebonded. He really_ wants _to be you."_

_Tylendel nodded. "I know it sounds absurd but it would explain a lot of other absurdities."_

_"Like that I'm still alive and he's not tried to change that yet. He must know I don't plan to help him, and there's a lot of easier ways he could get power than by draining it from me. This really is personal, isn't it? He wants me to..." Validate him? Something like that. Vanyel's purely sexual surrender had surely been gratifying to Leareth's ego, even through that superficial veil, but he hadn't tried to dispose of Vanyel afterwards._

_So maybe all this time, Vanyel's nemesis had had a crush on him._ Stef would be amused - _and he immediately regretted even_ thinking _of Stefen because now more than ever he couldn't dare a_ trace _of that still-living bond in his mind. If Leareth came to know that he had lifebonded again..._

_"What are you going to do now?" asked Tylendel. "He's not going to stop, Van."_

_"I need to kill him."_

_"You need to get out of here!" 'Lendel flung his hands up, gesturing at the sky. "I'll help you, I promised that. But killing isn't enough -"_

_"Hells, listen to you," he hissed. "He had Savil and Yfandes killed. I've half a theory he had_ Staven _killed." 'Lendel's eyes closed, and his face twisted in, damn him, pity. It didn't make sense. "How could you not want to see him dead?"_

 _"I_ can't _, Van. I can't want that as much as I want you safe. Do you not know what I had to give up here?" Open eyes, tears freezing to his cheeks. "The more you hate him the further down you'll fall. Don't you -"_

_Van turned away from him angrily, but stumbled. He felt the ice beneath him crack, and then everything went dark._


	3. Chapter 3

He had no names for his nightmares. He knew most of them, the worst of those from years behind - lies told to him by clutching demons, confinement and pain and helplessness forever and always. He awoke, but felt no different. They hadn't _gone_ anywhere, and they had left him sure they _never would_.

He searched for his cold inner sanctuary, or anywhere where he was and they weren't, Leareth wasn't, _nothing_ was. It seemed far away now; he felt much worse than he had when he'd first crawled into bed. He ached. And felt nauseous, shuddering in silk. There was a little light here, filtering down from the turret above, and he made a better one and cupped it in his hand, wanting his magic close to him. At least he was alone in his tangled sheets, but his mind was unrested, his body...distant.

 _'Lendel. I was speaking to..._ either a ghost or a fantasy, but even that had been some small and cruel remnant of his humanity. They'd been together in that little gap between his waking nightmares and sleeping ones, until he'd done something to spoil even that. _What did I say, 'Lendel?_ He tried to grasp the substance of the dream but it was like shadows in the ice. _You were weeping at me. And then -_

\- he had fallen into the worst of nightmares.

 _Whatever I did to deserve that, I did it to you._ The additional guilt barely registered; he was getting used to waking every day to more unfinished business, things he'd done wrong and couldn't undo. Of course he felt unrested. Sleep couldn't protect him from this. He'd known it the night before he left Haven; there would be no rest for him until Leareth was dead. No peace. Not for him or anyone who came near him. And he couldn't apologise for any of it, hadn't even when Yfandes had urged him to say sorry to - _no, he's gone just like he should be._

Vanyel couldn't allow himself humanity. It was the source of all weaknesses, all distractions.

He sent his light out from his hand, and found that his old clothes were gone, as were his other meagre belongings. He sighed, and pulled a sheet around himself as he went to investigate the wardrobe.

He wasn't sure what he had expected - perhaps things like what Leareth himself wore, lined up in endlessly regular black much like his enemy's soldiers. Certainly he hadn't expected to see so much colour... His hands slipped from garment to garment, testing each texture between the pads of his fingers. Surely his younger self would have been fascinated by this exotic collection, sleek mimicries of court garbs from cities all over Velgarth. The wealth of colour made his little light seem a prism. There was a mirror inside the wardrobe door, and Vanyel noted how grey he seemed beside the splendour.

He was unsure what to think of this. A gift? A display of Leareth's riches, and perhaps of the reach of his webs of influence. Another attempt at showing Vanyel the wonders that he had to share; and it made him think of the proceeding offering - that moment in the night where two bodies had met, so familiar, and now he was left with that lingering sense that both those bodies were of strangers to him.

What logic had he offered to Tylendel? Accept it now, kill it later. He should have no remaining modesty to hide from Leareth, anyway. He searched until he found some plain undershifts, and pondered the merits of eschewing the finery and just wearing a few layers of linen, but the thought of being near Leareth in underclothes felt distinctly uncomfortable. 

_Still feeling weak, whether I accept or refuse his every overture. If I could -_ he considered an impulsive fantasy of leaving his body in the iceworld and sending only his mind, only his magical arsenal, beyond to deal with his enemies. _Foolish, and tempting._

Of course there was nothing white - that would have been too easy - so he chose a warm-looking robe of dark blue velvet with the fur of some unnameable beast lining its collar. It wasn't wholly unfamiliar - he'd seen similar things in Rethwallen, albeit not made for a northern winter. He tucked his mage-focus inside it, not wanting to feel Leareth's dubious gift between the stone and his skin. At least he'd be warm, and that would help both his body and his wits recover their fighting form.

He extended his mind, as delicately as he was still able, and it sprang back a moment later; Leareth was in the room below him. Alone.

Vanyel paused to collect his plans, leaning on one wall and combing his hair with his fingernails, his little light bobbing above his head. It shone freely; nothing had tried to stop him from using magic, although he expected that - yes - his enemy was still shielded to the nines, and there was _something_ odd about even the structure of his tower. He couldn't reach either his magic, or his mind-gifts, beyond it. It took a few seconds of exploration to realise that its walls were probably infused with a blocking substance similar to the powder Leareth's gang had used to ensnare him, and he dropped his exploratory touch clumsily at the thought of it, cursing himself. _It's just another reason to want him dead - why am I letting it weaken me?_

So he still had his magic. Leareth had allowed him a prison so comfortable he could feign ambiguity about it being a prison, and had crossed the line from courting Vanyel to...well, he didn't care to put a name to what they were to each other now. Perhaps Tylendel was right, and Leareth was playing with some sick fantasy of genuine courtship. The thought was noxious, and his hands fisted around the ends of his hair. He couldn't trust his body, the unfamiliar clothing, the floor beneath him, or even his battered mind. _Would I tidy my hair to kill anyone?_ he thought belatedly.

Whatever challenge Leareth would put to him today wouldn't be eased by waiting. He killed his light and descended the stairs barefoot, and stayed in their shadowed recess to look upon his host. Leareth looked straight at him, darkness unable to fool his still darker eyes; he sat at the head of the long, thin table, a candle either side of him, the rest of the space left dim.

Vanyel's hand reached without his asking for the knife he no longer wore.

His loathing felt like a tight band against his ribs - a separate thing in his body, making it harder to move and breathe, muscle-memory of hot hate and treacherous pleasure. He spared some of his fury for himself. Why in hells had he played along for even a second?

"Come sit with me," said his enemy, and Vanyel hated himself for obeying.

The table was a little longer than the height of a man, and the only other chair was placed at the end of it; at least there'd be no risk of Leareth touching him as they spoke. Vanyel set his aching body against its back; there were candles at each corner of his end of the table too, and he lit them with a whisper. He had his magic, and even with scant reserves he was determined to show that he knew it. 

"You slept well?" asked Leareth.

"Soundly," he replied.

"Perhaps you would now like to share a meal with me."

Vanyel hesitated, remembering his wariness of touching or taking, but after betraying himself so thoroughly when Leareth had joined him in his bed he saw little purpose in continuing to refuse anything as necessary as food. "Indeed so."

A bell rang, seemingly on the floor below them; _thus mages play, hands never touching the game-pieces._ "As you can see," Leareth said, "you may live very finely within my walls. I will give you any comfort, grant you any honour, make any dream of yours real."

He spoke softly, as if with claws retracted. Vanyel had heard such offers before, usually attached to pleas for mercy; perhaps it was Leareth's confidence that made this one unsettle him so much. Or perhaps the talk of dreams. Did Leareth _know_ his harrowed mind had been retreating into visions of Tylendel?

On a rational level Vanyel knew such things were near-impossible to discover without a powerful gift of Thought-Sensing, which Leareth didn't have - so his enemy could only be _assuming_ that, whoever else might have shared his bed over the years, Vanyel's wants and dreams and solaces were still bound tight to Tylendel. But he couldn't escape the nightmare-touch on his neck and its whisper of _you caused this. You led him, and he followed your tracks into madness. You asked for it -_

He forced away the leaden thoughts. _Show no fear._ "And what is it you want from me in return?"

Leareth's lips parted, pleased by his directness; _I knew he was an amateur._ Negotiation was an art he knew well, and Leareth most likely not at all. Judging from the memories he'd ripped out of Rendan, Leareth knew no tools of persuasion except mortal fear. Which obliged Vanyel to do his utmost to not be afraid of him. "You have already granted me the great prize of your company -"

The door downstairs rattled open, and Vanyel was grateful to have Leareth's eyes off him in the moments after those words.

A trio of dark-robed servants entered, and he watched them kneel one by one, burdens still in hand, before approaching their master's table. Vanyel took the opportunity to examine the spells that bound them, and he found they weren't as strong as Leareth's talents indicated he was capable of - but they didn't have to be, not augmented as they were by so much obvious _fear_. He could imagine it easily; thralls picked over for errors or signs of resistance, sacrifices taken in front of the rest. He had learned more about blood mages than he would have ever cared to, and he expected Leareth would prove to be worse than the most of them.

They left food on the table, and wine, and water, a frail young woman pouring Vanyel a glass of each with practised grace; he murmured his thanks and she didn't even look up at him. They knelt again, waiting as still as so many dolls with their knees on the hard stone floor until Leareth dismissed them with a tap of one foot. _He doesn't even speak to them. They're like marionettes, controlled, not even treated like people any more..._ He knew Leareth surely intended the same fate for him. _It's what he does to people. Control through terror._

The servants left, heads low, and he examined the fare they'd brought; a hearty lunch of fresh bread and fillets of some white riverfish, flavoured with a sauce that smelt of cloying herbs and honey. He ate without tasting much, intent only on recovering his much-needed strength; he drank only water. He felt Leareth watching him, and when he dared a look he found him smiling. "As I was saying," continued Leareth, "Meeting with you had always been one of my highest hopes. You are, after all, quite extraordinary..." He sipped his wine theatrically. "As am I."

 _Is that why you killed my dear aunt and my Companion?_ Vanyel let the rage come together in a heated weight, throbbing between his focus stone and the place his heart had once been. "You have the advantage of me," he replied politely. "I know very little of you, and you seem to know more than a trifle of me."

"I have successfully hidden myself away here, yes. And yet, you came to me." _To kill you -_ "Just as I had hoped, for so long."

Leareth sounded _wistful_ , and satisfied, and if his shields had been any less thorough Vanyel might just have stood up and punched him. "And what made _me_ worthy of such attentions?" he asked levelly; he was _better_ at this than his enemy and determined not to be baited, no matter how obvious his hostility should be.

"You don't need to play the fool with me, Vanyel. You have fought in the daylight while I have lingered in shadow - every corner of the world knows your name, and the deeds you've done for a land that _does not deserve you._ " Vanyel forced the courtly mask to remain in place, inwardly flinched at the words, serrated-vicious and possessive. "That angers me. Magic is meant to rule, not to serve."

"You kill mages."

The impulsive rebuttal was met with a flash of teeth. "Only the strongest can rule. I have always wanted one I could not kill. To see you _kneel_ to a mere king...it disgusted me. And now your land has come to _repel_ mages - why would you serve where you are not even wanted?" Something must have shown on his face, for Leareth continued; "Yes, I know of Valdemar's new defences against mages..." Leareth's brow twitched, and Vanyel's diplomatic instincts recognised both the tell and the statement's openness; he didn't know a godsdamned thing except that they'd got _something_ and he would like to know its workings so it could be neutralised.

"Aye," he replied easily. "Subtle, but we've been pleased with their effectiveness." Leareth's eyes narrowed slightly, while Vanyel's mind leapt at his entirely inadvertent suggestion - stars, but why hadn't he thought of it sooner?

Silently, he invoked the fleeting cloud by its true name. He watched it settle above Leareth, well aware that his enemy may be aware of its presence and perhaps even its purpose; it didn't matter, because there simply was no way to defend against Truth Spell. Vanyel himself had _tried_ , with a blend of magical and empathic shielding and assistance from an amused Tantras, and if _he_ couldn't stop the _vrondi_ from knowing, and fleeing, when he lied, Leareth couldn't possibly do it.

Better yet, invoking the _vrondi_ here would bring this land under their watchful gaze permanently. He couldn't know for sure how Leareth would respond to their scrutiny, but Vanyel was willing to try any weapon he could find. _Still nothing but air between my hands, but it might be enough air to bluff with._

He'd used the first stage only; the second stage, which would force Leareth to speak only truth to him, would attract an uncomfortable amount of attention to the ploy. 

"So why remain a servant? I can offer you more. So much more than your ailing king _ever_ could."

"Such as?" he asked. _Show me your cards, you fool._

Leareth's voice fell into a hungry whisper, and his eyes filled with excitement. "The greatest gift any man could _ever_ offer to another, Vanyel; _time_. I could make you immortal, just like I am."

Vanyel's mouth opened in a rictus of surprise. Not, _not_ , at the outrageous promise but at the _vrondi_ holding steady above his enemy's head. Leareth _wasn't lying_. He had genuine, utter faith in what he had said.

_You're mad, or brilliant, or both._

 

He was left alone to _'consider the proposal,'_ extinguished all four candles with a flash of his mind, raged behind his shields in the dark. There was no light inside the tower, no fire, only what he could make with his mind. He ran up two turns of unlit steps to the turret, and found an iron-grate door and the last of the daylight outside it. It wasn't locked, but there was nothing much beyond it; a pointed roof, the thinnest of paths around it, presumably for maintenance use. The battlements came close to the level of Vanyel's eyes, not even usable as a defensive platform.

He opened the bolt and went outside anyway, and stared toward the setting sun. He'd run all night, fought all morning, slept all day and compromised every way with his plight, perhaps for _nothing_? He reached a hand down to the pendant under his clothes, felt it smoulder. What had he _done_?

_Run here to kill someone who says he's unkillable. That's what I've done._

It was, now said, far too easy to catch himself believing it. Rendan had _known_ Leareth was exceptionally old - and he neither looked nor felt it - and Vanyel had assumed at all kinds of youth-inducing Changemagic, but _immortality_? Truly? He didn't consider it _possible_ but the reckless way he'd been goaded - herded - _all but chased into his arms_ \- would make a lot more sense if it had all been carried out at no risk to Leareth. While Vanyel had lost _everything_ and thrown away whatever he had left. Why serve his country? He _couldn't_ serve, not now. His Companion was dead, and he couldn't reach out beyond these walls without gathering the power to rip them down first. There was nothing he could do to save Valdemar.

He felt like _screaming._

He curled a hand through the wrought iron door, making the rough corners grate against his fingers. He tried to force away the feeling and look at it _tactically_. The game had changed. Or he'd never known the rules. Or he still didn't. His planning had to take Leareth's claim at face value; how could he take down an _immortal_?

Two paths presented themselves. Uncover the source of Leareth's secret, and end it; or replicate it and become the most patient of killers, because given a few centuries of effort Vanyel believed there really wasn't anything he _couldn't_ do with magic. Either way, he _had_ to learn how in the hells it were possible, and that would mean further collusion with his enemy.

_And at that point I may as well take him up on his offer -_

He froze, feeling a sharp sensation in his chest. What? Had he _really_ been about to talk himself into _that_?

_Well, what the hell else am I going to do?_

He pushed his despair aside, widened his tactical considerations. Leareth was simply delusional about the extent of his power. That was all. _Vrondi_ couldn't abide lying, but they had no compunctions about madness. But how much longer could he stall for time while he looked to prove Leareth's mortality once and for all? The trap was closing, and there he was inside it, not even sure if there was any point left in trying to escape.

_And the only person I could even talk to about it is 'Lendel..._

Now that was a fanciful thought, even if he hadn't somehow lost his grip on the icescape where he'd been speaking to Tylendel. The thought of sleep - real, restful sleep, with a recklessly rejuvenating tapline into the node below - was so tempting, but he couldn't imagine anything good would come of even _trying_. But _gods_ , he was tired, and casting one delusion against another fitted his sense of futility. He pulled the iron door closed behind him, plodded down the stairs, found the saccharine-sumptuous bed made, threw himself onto it, stretching spreadeagle, hands curling so the nails dug into his palms.

He couldn't sleep. Godsdammit he was _afraid_ to sleep, didn't want to deal with nightmares of demons and definitely not with midnight advances, or with anyone or anything wearing the face of Tylendel, and he was cold enough already without falling back into the dark water. He forced himself into a meditative, magical wakefulness and sent himself down towards the node.

All physicality fell away from him, excepting only his focus-stone, which he could _always_ feel, a meeting-place between his own energies and those of the world outside him. Everything else was energy; flowing, static, blocked, all action and reaction. He let his mind drink off the rivulets, not enough to fill up the hole inside him but every taste was precious. Every moment was a resource, a chance to kill.

The node was more normal than he'd dared to expect; augmented by many years of labour, much like a larger version of his own nodes beneath Haven. For a moment he wondered if he could make use of the nonspace it occupied to navigate his mind-magic around Leareth's blockades, but it was so bright that he knew he'd lose his mind trying. He kept his presence outside it, examining it from every possible perspective before daring to touch.

There was nothing wrong with it; he didn't care to think how much blood had been spilled for its construction, but its interior wasn't at all peculiar. No, what was strange was the lines running _out_ of it. He'd been right about Leareth tapping power via others; he sensed several mages collecting energy from the node, none of whom were Leareth himself. Leareth, he realised, didn't sully his mind with _work_ ; he used other people for that, and milked them dry afterwards. Had he given all of them the same wild spiel he'd given Vanyel? Goaded them with talk of rulership, offered them nonsense, made them slaves?

 _No. He and I...it's personal. He_ watched _me, maybe for decades. He wants more from me than just another conduit._ The thought made him glad to be momentarily bodiless, although the gods knew there were other parts of him that could still feel harm here. He let tendrils of himself reach for the edge of the node, mind desperate for power -

He felt the brush of air - air, where there should have been nothing - and knew it _was_ a trap - and the node was a perfect bait to make him drop his physical defences. He _tried_ to pull away, rush back to his body, but his mind was heavy with the vast node's natural magnetism - he should have _known_ , should never have let his let his mind get so entangled while he was so defenceless.

It took him long seconds to realise that the words were physical. "Are you watching the node? Taking from it?"

Accusing or tempting or rendering him complicit, words like iron knives, tasting of every drop of blood that had been poured into that node - Vanyel shook his mind free, barrelled back toward his body, found it in Leareth's arms. _No -_

He halted his return at the barest thread of physicality, felt hands on his shoulders, his throat. _No. Run. Anywhere. Between, away,_ don't touch _me._ He lashed out with his mind, and the uncontrolled attack clumsily rebounded from Leareth's shielding. He shrank from the hands on his skin, under clothing, flung his mind away from it, back towards nothingness with nothing he could do. The hands on his shoulders pushed him into the dark.

_Trapped below ice in the centre, cracking above him. Hands on his shoulders, pulling him out of the dark. "Van! Gods, Van, I'm sorry, I couldn't -"_

He was feeling - _feeling_ \- in two different directions, four hands and one voice. His mind held brittle between them, a breath away from breaking. A whisper too close and too-warm; "Van, I know what you like," hands against his neck, squeezing; "I _know_ you."

 _Hands letting go, leaving him cast alone on the ice, shivering like he could tear their world apart, like he_ was _tearing their world apart, Tylendel a panicking shadow over_

needed to move to breathe limbs trapped under silk and pressure on his throat, his body trapping him with _need to breathe_ no escape no more freedom no air a kiss against his cold lips and another body shifting over his, caught completely, helpless, a sinuous brush against his shields. "Let me in. I'll give you so much back," words barely heard over babbling pressure, Leareth

_cracks spreading outwards climbing the walls splitting everything open_

taking the precious streams of power that he'd gathered, not much not nothing, not his any more, nothing was his any more, throat crushed and nothing else to feel except whatever he was made to feel. Body just a toy to another's touch, holding jerking twisting, shifting on his neck, touching the one point of light still left

_"Van, move!" And he did, arms thrown around his head instinctively as a slab of ice fell into the space he'd been standing in. He reached for a wall that wasn't there and_

amber light, blinding. A thread of air and mercy and he thrashed on it, a fish on a line in the sand, and the power inside him rose up killing-hot through the stone and up into his bloodless hands, out

_into the void._

_Stumbled to his knees and feeling a shocking peace around him, 'Lendel standing above him. Eyes meeting in the stillness, a shared moment, pine-scent and safety and a world where nothing was his fault and sex still meant joy and love still meant always; until the power came back to him_

The power came back to him and he spun all of it into his shields, fractal lattices blotting out every possible opening. He couldn't feel a damn thing from Leareth's mind any more but his _body_ told him, a backward jolt from pain, enough to let him breathe free and pull inward, his arms crossing above his face. He shoved hard with that natural barrier and felt his enemy fall onto his back, and he seized the upper hand, rolling atop him and laying his forearms over Leareth's throat, pressing down as hard as he could. "You know what I like, do you?" he hissed. "Godsdamnyou, why are you _pretending_? Is there nothing else _to_ you? Nothing but lies?"

"And power," came a choked whisper in answer. "I have so much power to give you in return."

"Then tell me how. In the morning. Yourself." Bluffing with hands full of flesh, familiar, false, empty.

He felt the body below his _shift_ ; suddenly cold and hard and hungry. He unlocked his arms, and ran grasping hands over a different face, one that might have been a flower, soft and symmetrical, a true form as constructed as the tactile illusion had been. _You Changed yourself. Magesmithery, everything you make, everything you_ are _, is a weapon. I need to know..._ Vanyel took a kiss, soft but unkindly. He shouldn't have, but needed to. He found he knew the taste already, the same blood-ichor he'd felt the night before. His skin tingled, pins needles and power, and within his shields his mind seemed to dance above the light of the unexpected victory, as carelessly treacherous as his body. He slipped back down onto the bed, and he felt Leareth's gasping mind hammer against his shields, finding no defect.

Leareth's attacks faded away, and Vanyel exalted. He felt hands touching him, unsteady strokes down his torso, seeking a sensual reaction, and he willed himself to move away. "Leave me."

And once his bed was empty, once the thrill of combat had seeped away and his arousal with it, he found himself afraid and ashamed and angry again. He wrapped a hand under the silver chain, touched the emerging bruises on his neck, let himself hurt and drift outwards. He sensed that boundary between real and dream, permeable now, and he let his mind slip through it

_still fractured, and he clung to ice, breathing too hard to scream, felt warm presence nearby. There was darkness behind each fissure, tempting and terrifying him. "Keep still, Van," Tylendel warned him. "If you go out there now, you'll take all of this with you, and you'll be lost. Stay with me. Trust me, if you can?"_

_Always. He stilled himself, and he felt the icescape fusing back together around him; the barrier between all things reassembling, clear ice over emptiness, and he looked out into the void a second before it frosted closed._

_Someone looked back._


	4. Chapter 4

_His thoughts settled like so many scattered snowflakes, the cold canyon breeze carrying their finer points far out of his reach. Great gods, what was that out there?_ Who _was it? He ought to know, but he couldn't fit a name to those eyes, couldn't place it. He couldn't place a_ lot _of things. Felt like he was scrabbling for his own missing pieces, and failing to find them._

_"Van -" Tylendel was kneeling close by him, seeming wary and concerned._

_"He took my power," Vanyel spat, furious with himself for letting it happen. His_ power _. Filtered through_ his _focus-stone, the one thing left that still_ was _his - a relic that had once known love and honour._ Nothing _was his, everything was tainted and gone._

 _He tried to pull himself upright, and sank back in disorientation. He couldn't_ see _clear across his mind - he felt footsteps, imprints, everywhere. Leareth had violated his last meagre sanctuary._

_His thoughts stumbled back to that summertime, and the mage who'd attacked him - a servant of Leareth's wearing the shell persona of the power-thief; a patchwork of the lost with daylight showing through every fraying swatch of mentality. Had he taken that image from Leareth? Leareth who was more false than real, a dark mirror of all envies, who could only ever pretend to be someone who was wanted? Leareth who'd stolen everything he had?_

_Even shorn of every lie, Leareth was terrifying. Lethal and ravenous and without the slightest restraint. He could easily have killed Vanyel - taken a knife to his throat rather than his hands - but he hadn't. He'd chosen a show of dominance instead, and Vanyel had been unable to do anything to repel him._

_But_ someone _had._

_He forced himself to sit up. "Did you shield me?"_

_Tylendel shook his head. "Would that I could. I've no magic now."_

_"Someone did." He thought of the eyes that had looked back at him from the void, and shivered. It felt so empty out there; bereft of attachments, a thousand times more desolate than his snowfield had ever been, yet whatever lurked out there beyond the ice was something he instinctively recognised._ I don't fear it. But I wish I could tear down these walls and see what in hells it's playing at. _"Where...where is that? Out there?"_

_"It's complicated," said Tylendel._

_"It always is," he snapped back, and immediately regretted it._ I don't mean to hurt you, I never would, you're the only safe thought I have left and don't know how not to ruin even that - _"Just tell me."_

_Tylendel did look hurt, but a little wry, as if Vanyel was a cat and he'd expected to feel claws. "It has no name, but...if we're on an island, that's the water."_

_Vanyel processed the analogy; when it came to planar geometry, metaphor was frequently the only sound means of navigation. "But surely crossing it is the only means of escape?"_

_'Lendel tilted his head. "You're probably right, but I know you couldn't survive out there right now. You made all this -" he gestured around them "- to stay alive inside. Look at your_ hands _, Van." He did; they were blue-tinged, frost gathering on his nails, and he remembered the blood he'd shed previously, its translucency. "Down here, you keep yourself captive to survive. It's enough for that, but not enough to - well, you saw what happened when it cracked open -"_

 _The pain. The_ touching _, the press of nightmare - he'd not swum out into the void, but sunk below like a stone. "That was the Abyss, wasn't it?"_

 _"Maybe the part of it that's close to your mind." Tylendel looked worried, and Vanyel recognised the attempt to play down a truth he'd already known._ There's a hell below that wants me - _He'd been touched by the Abyssal things again, claimed and condemned, called by old scars or by his only possible future. It was as real as the kiss he and Tylendel had shared in his dreams that night last summer, and as much of a part of him - little wonder he'd been afraid to sleep._

_It was too late for fear, here under grey skies beyond the last hint of daylight. He knew he ought to stop looking up, stop even trying to get out of the trap he'd flung himself into. Why, what had driven him, to accept Leareth's crazed advances? Why had he ever said yes? Survival wasn't worth it. Leareth's pledges were unbelievable, and he'd already learned that the ones that came true hurt worst of all. 'Lendel in his bed, and in his mind - "This is his promise, is it? You being stuck here with me."_

_Tylendel met the accusation with his eyes, and riposted firmly. "His_ doom _, Van, if you'll make it so. Look at what happened just now; he hurt you and you slipped back here and I had to be here for you. Didn't I tell you we would stand back-to-back against anything?"_ Oh 'Lendel I still know every word you ever said to me - _"You can hold me to that, I promise you. I won't let him beat you. I won't let you be what he wants you to be."_

_Vanyel tried to control the welling of hope in his throat. It was useless, wasn't it? "And if it's true he's immortal?"_

_"You're the one who cast Truth Spell on him. You'd know."_

_He sighed, still looking for some way out of believing something so impossible and horrible. "I need to kill him. There has to be some way -"_

_Tylendel looked past him, down the crevasse's unfathomable distance. "You think one more death will set everything right again?"_

_"'Lendel, he -"_

_"Tell me again who he's killed. Say their names to me. Then tell me how many people you've killed going after him."_

_"I don't_ know _-"_

 _"Yes you do. You can't erase things like that even when you need to, I_ know _you. How many?"_

 _He hung his head. "Three dozen."_ And two of them were innocent. Oh, and I drove my lover away and wore my Companion to the bone and as good as let them carve her up and kill her _, should he say that, too? He felt Tylendel watching him serenely, not venturing to condemn him any further. 'Lendel knew him, maybe better than he had when he'd been alive._

_He thought of those two who had done him no wrong, the child and the herbman he'd burned together, and he shrank down inside. Lives spent for lives, to no purpose. Not a blunder, not a waste of effort, but a crime he'd committed in hate and anger._

_But he couldn't give up, could he? Surely 'Lendel understood that his own guilt was nothing compared to Leareth's intent to make war, or to the silent war he'd made in the past - and if anyone understood then Tylendel would, that every feud began somewhere - and he set down his most damning argument again. "I truly think Leareth did kill Staven, you know? He damn well_ showed _me he'd been watching us for that long - I think he butchered your twin just to get at you, and me. How can you not be angry?"_

_"Because I can't be, even if it's true," Tylendel replied, voice as dead as the air. "If I wanted to lose my temper over that again, I'd be trapped here for -" He trailed off, looking aside. "Until I ended up below, I guess."_

_"You've changed," Vanyel said, wondering and weary. The possibility had barely occurred to him, not even after that first time he'd seen Tylendel in his dreams; 'Lendel would always be the same young and loving and hotheaded and doomed boy whom he'd slept beside that long and feverish summer, while Vanyel got old and scarred and ever less innocent._

_"That's what I keep trying to tell you," he said softly. "It doesn't matter who killed Staven; what I did was still wrong. Whoever did it and however I felt. Van, please, I want to be that voice I needed and never heard, and I know how hard it is to hear it. Godsdamnit, you have every right and reason to feel the way you do. But you shouldn't let him destroy what you are. It's not worth it. Not to see him dead."_

_The words led him into a shock of feeling, pinpricks turning from inward to outward, making him feel like he'd rend apart anything he touched. "'Lendel -"_

_"You've every right to want him dead," Tylendel repeated._

_He shook, breathed as if he hadn't done so in days, and wondered why in hell it felt so good to hear that. He felt an awkward lump squeeze his throat, and tried to speak around it. "He can't be killed. What I want doesn't make a difference."_

_"No, and what you do still can, if you let go of it and look beyond killing and dying. I didn't learn that until it was far too late." Tylendel looked warmly towards him. "I know you can do better than me. And please understand, Van, you'll always be yourself and I'll always love you."_

_Van's desperation warred with his hope and he felt the lump simmer into tears. He_ knew _'Lendel wasn't lying but - how could - He looked up into Tylendel's eyes, unsure how it could even still be possible. 'Lendel_ knew _what he'd done, where he'd been, who had touched him, and - he wasn't trying to throw Vanyel away._

 _He still_ loved _him._

_"'Lendel," he whispered. "I'm sorry. For everything. I swear. Just tell me, what can I do?"_

_"You'll take my advice?" Tylendel was rueful, and Vanyel nodded unsteadily - years spent trying to not need Tylendel, and he always would. "Well, remember that you're not the only one he's hurt. You're not alone out there. Not even if you want to be."_

I want to be. _He stared upwards and saw snow swirling in the air -_ soon to bury us deeper. _"I'll remember." It was all he had, words and scars the only things he could bear from one world to another. "It's not safe for me to rest this long," he sighed._

_"It's not safe to forgo rest either. You'll need all the strength you can get, right?" Tylendel's lips curled - he seemed distant again, a gentle watcher of horizons; not what Vanyel had ever looked for from his so impassioned and direct 'Lendel. It was more than worth having, so tried to force his mind down from its state of taut panic. "I'll look out for you from in here, and outside -" he set his hand to the frosted boundary of Vanyel's subconsciousness "- you've got whatever-that-was." Vanyel nodded, and tried to believe it. He could more or less accept that support; peace was much harder to attain._

 

He awoke at the scrape of a door far below him; in a moment he was alert and assessing his ammunition. His physical strength seemed improved, and even his magical reserves had recovered a little. That wasn't normally surprising; even without tapping nodes, ambient magic and one's own life energy would gradually replenish reserves - but that he'd been able to spend a few hours recovering without interference spoke of something committed to his protection. That was hard for him to believe, much less rely upon.

There was no one nearby; someone two floors below him, perhaps. Close enough to make him wary. He closed his eyes and scanned around his vicinity; no mages nearby, although the person who moved below was wreathed in spells - and when he glanced, with great caution, down towards the node he saw markedly fewer lines leading out of it than he had the night before. _Where are they all?_ He couldn't be cheered at the thought of the mages disconnecting; most likely, they were preparing to go lay waste to Valdemar. _I don't know how much time I have left to stop him or die trying, but I'm not taking any change as a good sign right now. I can't._

He crept from his bed and took note of his disarrayed clothing; torn ties at the collar, and he reached up a hand to probe the bruises on his neck. The memory was so alive he almost felt like it was still happening, and he was taken by a wave of dizziness, had to remind himself that he could breathe, fought not to sink straight back down to where he'd slept. _It's past and done. He's not here, you fool, so take advantage of that while it lasts._ He shook his head firmly. He still hurt everywhere, more acutely now, as if Tylendel's words had somehow cut through his dullness. And every wound was a reminder of some irrevocable error he'd made.

What now? When he'd forced Leareth off, he'd as good as promised to bear his company today. Best prepare for that, mentally and magically. He checked over his shielding, and reinforced the physical boundaries, particularly around his joints and other vulnerable areas. He looked again in the wardrobe, in case there was any clothing in there that was tough enough to offer a little protection, but of course not. 

He might have liked to hide up in the turret until Leareth came to prod him through the bars of his delightful trap, but he still felt unsteady and his throat was dry, and the thought of a few mouthfuls of cold water was enough of an enticement to make him feel able to deal with the probably innocuous visitor. He hastened down the two turns of stairs, and found that it was indeed no one of consequence; one of the robed thrall-servants, a broom in her pale hands and a few ragcloths tucked into her belt.

Her shoulders hunched as he entered, and she glanced up with blank eyes and then quickly looked away. He observed her from the corner of his eye as he cupped a handful of water from the pipes, but saw that she was determined to ignore him. Which was fine by him; he didn't welcome another presence, and while she might seem harmless and avoidant she could easily be charged to spy on him, and instinct inclined him to shut down all his spiralling thoughts of resistance and escape until she left the tower. _Even if his minions aren't malicious, he can use them to waste my time._

He watched her as he drank his fill, in a deliberate unthinking state, determined not to allow his mind to betray him. He recognised that she'd been there yesterday morning. She was young, but swept the stone floor with a slightly odd gait. He shook off his hands, and in response to the slight sound of it she halted, shrinking away.

The image, the movement, coalesced into everything instinct could never have told him. _She hates being here more than I do, and she's - not injured, no. I think she's pregnant._

Vanyel extended a touch of his Empathy - the last gift he could have possibly expected to need here - and while she had no shielding against mind-magic, he found it hard to read her feelings; natural emotional defences warred against a magical coercion, and from the embattled centre of her he felt only endurance.

And he caught the mirror-sense of himself in her peripheral vision; he was at best an obstacle to her survival, at worst a potential spy.

_Oh 'Lendel, I am ten kinds of idiot, and you knew it._

He dropped the empathic contact, and examined the spell she was under. It was a blood binding that connected her to its caster for as long as the spell were maintained; Leareth would always know her whereabouts, and could control her will when necessary, but Vanyel suspected the only permanent command on it was one of automatic obedience to his words. A blood mage with dozens of slaves couldn't spend much of his time interfering with any one of them, but the existence of the bond was enough to make for a litany of paranoia - _not knowing_ when Leareth might make use of the dormant connection, or what he might do with it, might be the most horrible part of her situation.

She seemed to have finished her present task, and she walked towards the stairs. He considered following; _I need to talk to her - but I've nothing she'd want to hear._ Tylendel had been painfully right - he truly hadn't thought about Leareth's thralls at _all_ , beyond a conscientious desire to kill as few of them as possible. _Maybe..._ He probed the spell again, looking for its roots.

It wasn't as crude as most of the bloodcraft he'd seen - above all, blood magic was the use of cruelty to create vast amounts of energy, so most blood mages relied on force above finesse. But Leareth seemed to think himself an artist.

Vanyel trespassed deep into the energy of her, finding the backbrain lines that carried commands to her that defied her own thoughts. He would have liked to extract them and direct them to nearby inanimate things and seen how well Leareth could control the will of the dining-chairs, but they were too barbed to move without damaging her mind. He'd have to cut them off elsewhere, which could cause just as much harm.

One odd weakness of blood magic was that bringing down a spell returned no energy to its caster, because its caster hadn't supplied that energy in the first place. Instead, it found its way back to the victim, if they were still living. Knowing Leareth, the blood that he'd used to bind this woman would be her own.

He spent minutes knelt on the stones, knitting a shield around those vicious invaders to protect her from the impact of their end. _At least Leareth won't notice until the next time he calls for her personally, and out of maybe-hundreds of thralls, why would he...? Unless he chose her to watch me -_

He dismissed the paranoid speculation immediately. It wasn't even solely his; it was pressing against him from his immersion in her mind. _Trouble showed up in straggly Whites. Am I damning you?_ he wondered, and cut her free.

Something hit the floor upstairs.

He hesitated a moment, and then followed her upwards; he found her frozen in the centre of the room, leaning on her broom with both hands. He had no idea what to say to her in greeting, and she spared him the dilemma with a torrent of whispered swearing.

She had never even looked at him before. Not so much as out of the corner of her eye. He tried not to be taken aback by the much-deserved viciousness in her pale face. She paused for a breath, then added, "The fuck you doing, you fool?"

He ignored the instinct to apologise. "I broke the spell you were under -"

"And how much shit that going to make?"

"He won't know," Vanyel tried to assure her, hearing his soft voice rise. "Not if you keep pretending like it's still there. He's got too many people in thrall to notice just one getting loose."

"You don't know nothing about him." Her hands clenched and for a moment he thought she might try to hit him with the broom. _No name_ , he realised. _Leareth has no name to them - he's everywhere. A devil they don't speak of._ "What the fuck are you trying at? He'll just bind you and has what he wants from you -"

Words cut and blood ran out. "He already did."

She swayed against her grip. She seemed less surprised by his response than he was. "Why did you come here?"

"Because I wanted him dead." He was whispering now, knowing that he was dragging her into words long forbidden. _You told me, I shouldn't keep wanting that._

"What, don't like being his honoured guest?" Vanyel swallowed down bile at the implied accusation; he'd lost _everything_ and she thought him in a much safer position than her? _She's not wrong_ , he forced himself to admit. _I've got magic, for one thing._ "He don't die," she said. "He's always been. He goes, he comes back."

"I know," he said. "Lord Rendan told me."

"You got a civil word out of that cunt?"

"I read his mind," _in a way I shouldn't have done._ "Then I killed him."

"Well, thanks." It was more than irony, and he sensed a sliver of respect before she added, "You stupid bastard."

"Listen," he said, "You know he's going to attack Valdemar?"

"He's always said that -"

"He means it. I was the last person who could stop him and now I don't know how. But this is so much more than just me and him, now -"

"You don't fucking say."

He shrank back against the doorjam. _I_ know _, gods forgive my arrogance._ "It's more than I can do alone."

She stared at him, contemplatively. "You want me for what now? You not got enough from the whole wood being on at him, and the mages going -" The door below them clattered open, and she screwed her eyes shut. She ran to him and shoved past him, onto the upward turn of stairs. He wanted to beg her to tell him, _what about what mages? And the wood?_ "You never said a damn word to me, alright?"

"What's your name?" he asked in a whisper.

"Crow."

"I'm Vanyel -"

"We know who you are, alright?" She hurried up the stairs, and he let the contact and all it had told him of her dissipate inwards; too young to give up, too smart to be brave. He sank into a chair, mentally shaking off that sensation of her life brushing against his - he could feel, hear Leareth's footsteps approaching him. Like he was an animal primed to the whip. He didn't even want to _think_ anything that might betray either of them.

He made himself look up when Leareth entered.

"I am here, as promised." Leareth smiled sweetly, as if this was a godsdamned _date_. "Would you take a walk with me?"


	5. Chapter 5

Vanyel might have been less angry if Leareth had asked him to do something he preferred to refuse - meekly saying yes and meaning it made Vanyel feel like his captor was leading him about on a string. He got to his feet, and wondered what Leareth saw; a wreck of his own making, fine clothes torn and his besmirched throat exposed, doing as he was told - how close must he seem to giving in? He felt lightheaded, and realised how long it had been since he had last been given food. No wonder he had limited energy and felt constantly on edge.

Leareth led him downstairs with graceful steps, Vanyel's following a little more erratically. He was mildly surprised to find his own white snowboots set neatly beside the door; more damnably, someone had cleaned and polished them. He slipped into them quickly as Leareth held open the tower's iron door. _Honoured guest, indeed. Do you entertain often?_ Was the cordiality an attempt to mock him? Vanyel doubted it came naturally.

He stepped outside into dim daylight. The sun hadn't risen over the high outer walls - so far north, it might never do so in winter - and there was little to see except grey snow. Most of the machinery of Leareth's empire lay in the valley below; here there were neat stacks of firewood, a small stable, icy stores of rainwater. For all his other theatrics, Leareth had kept the bare earth of his mountaintop as desolate as he had surely found it.

Vanyel had barely looked at the courtyard from within the tower; stepping into the open ground made him feel almost exposed, after being caught for so long in small circles and tight fissures of ice.

Leareth's eyes on the back of his neck didn't help that sensation, either. "If you'd follow me, Vanyel?"

Vanyel felt armed guards move to flank him, and he nodded curtly and allowed himself to be led towards the keep that had once been a temple. Leareth didn't try to touch him, but his blank-eyed soldiers communicated a constant threat. A few soldiers shouldn't trouble him. He felt his heart racing and instinctively, futilely considered escape.

_No. Not while we both still live._

The doors of the keep were flung open as they approached. Torchlights burned in the entrance, casting light against shining black walls. Vanyel shook the snow from his boots, treading careful on slick stone tiles, and he stepped into the hall and felt caught in the silence of the vaulted chamber. He felt his hand form a gesture of childish piety, and curled it into a fist. The chapel was as Changed as everything else in Leareth's world; monochrome fantasy, defiled by blood and elegance, and the thought of all the power that had twisted the walls made him feel sick and...

_Hungry isn't the word for being surrounded by power and yet having so little of it. Dead might be closer._

As he looked around he felt like he was reading the temple's memory and finding the lies painted atop it. There was hazy daylight in the chamber, filtered through thick patterned black-and-white glass, and Vanyel wondered if it had once been bright-stained to capture the mountain sun. Some fragments of the wall were rough stone rather than ebony, a relic of the place's fractured bones. There were too many doors, doubtless to match the temple's many additions - a whole household must be kept somewhere in the superfluous towers; baths and kitchens and every fancy to fill Leareth's wants - and the roof was higher than the walls could reasonably allow. His eyes searched the stonework for divine icons in the carved pillars and saw the same face over and over, replicated to mirrorlike perfection.

_Whatever god once dwelt here - I hope they're angry._

Leareth was smirking at him. "I see you appreciate my work."

He appreciated the _scale_ of the work very keenly. _You think living in a place that couldn't stand without you and the blood of your slaves impresses me?_ He held his tongue, and found himself staring at the altar. It was, of course, black, but remarkably plain, and he bit down on the inside of his cheek and invoked a flicker of MageSight. 

He _knew_ the twisted form of this place was going to feel like thorns scraping his inner eyes, but the altar was blinding. He closed himself gracelessly off, and wondered if Leareth had noticed. Probably. He was surely happy to see Vanyel fumble. "Well?" he pressed, watching Vanyel with narrow black eyes.

"It's impressive, as you know very well," Vanyel replied, cold but unsteady. Not the point. Leareth wanted to know that _he_ knew; he put traps in every sight he set before Vanyel's eyes, and poison in every word he said.

Leareth nodded, satisfied by his discomfort. "There is something I wish you to see."

He crossed the flagstone floor towards the altar, and Vanyel followed, almost flinching from the writhing force beneath it - a blood-mage's altar was something similar to a Heartstone, but rather than ambient magics it was infused by the life-force culled from human sacrifices. He would have happily blotted it out of the universe if he could.

In the corner behind it was a door that looked older than any of the rest, and Leareth gestured for it to swing open on its hinges; beyond was a small tower room, and the start of a winding stair.

As he looked upward Vanyel felt a flutter of unexpected pain. It was almost unaltered; stones smooth and furrowed, with only the central pillar reinforced by magic. _Oh, gods._

The trueness of it made it worse, and he felt his heart press against his ribs. Leareth climbed three steps and turned to him, and curled his hand as if he could move Vanyel with the same power with which he moved any other still object. "I have much to share with you. Come upward with me."

Vanyel wavered. Refusing now would be to admit his weakness, so he climbed after his tormentor and tried not to think about what this was. It wasn't rational, but he held an aversion to belltowers.

_He knows. He knows every damn other thing about Tylendel and I so he must know._

He crushed his own thoughts, concentrating only on placing one foot in front of the other _\- higher and higher, looking for the end -_ and keeping one hand to the wall for balance. After a few turns of the stair, he felt fevered and dizzy. There was no strength in him; he'd been wounded and had barely eaten in days, and his reserves were so empty _\- rage and pain and emptiness, and I'm not enough, not worth enough to keep you here -_ He shivered so hard he almost fell, and Leareth's steps paused above him.

 _No, damn you, I'm not letting you make me weak -_ he stumbled onward, leaning his weight against the wall, foot after foot on _the wide edge of the stair where you could run, they couldn't catch you, they couldn't reach you in time -_

Vanyel wrenched his mind away and found Leareth looking back at him from half a turn above. The present was no better than the past. His mind scrabbled. He was climbing on ice, numb muscles burning.

They went far higher than the top of his own little prison-turret. He ducked his eyes from window-slits, sick from hunger and vertigo and crude mathematics _\- how high have we twisted? High enough?_ His heart beat for every step of that tower he'd never been willing to climb. _We are, I know it. Above the height of the bell that tore my soul in two._

Each step was an agony and a horror, punishing his body even as the memories rattled his mind _\- higher, faster, up into the stormy sky where no one could stop you, no one could condemn or care._ They passed the bell-chamber and he closed his eyes to slits, trying to force its ninefold tolling from his head. _Did you know it would ring for you? Though she was dead - oh gods, Yfandes is dead -_ He stumbled, catching the stair with his hands, feeling nothingness almost close over him.

When he saw the shaft of daylight - saw Leareth stepping out onto the roof of the belltower, pallor lit by winter sun - he felt his heart toll against his chest, pounding his ribs into dust with its peals.

It wasn't over.

Vanyel staggered out into the light, and found Leareth leaning on the low parapet, serenely watching the world below.

His head swam as he tried to absorb what he saw. The tower below them - and the sheer cliff below that - and beyond, all the land he'd travelled, the mountain pass he'd crossed and the endless forest, a living green stain on the monotony of ice and rock. Past that, he knew, lay the border to Valdemar; all he'd ever cared for, all he'd loved, everything he had to defend and wouldn't return to.

Leareth looked over it all.

Leareth turned, and held his arms out, hands splayed against the stone wall. "Look at my kingdom, Vanyel."

"You're no king," he replied, still fighting for breath.

"You don't understand." Leareth stepped forward, his open hands stretching to the mountains around them, grey-white against a grey-blue sky. "Valdemar has no claim to this land. It's been hidden to you, ignored for lifetimes. I came here long ago, and I have been a more patient ruler than you could ever imagine. _Look upon my land_." Vanyel stepped forward, trembling, and from the edge of the tower he turned toward the mountains, the distance filling him with awe. "This is a harder country than you know. You've barely tasted the winter night." The words were hissed into his ear. "I have _become_ it."

Vanyel's eyes dropped. He stared straight down the cliffs, scarred rock reaching down to the valley floor. _So far below._

"I have drunk every drop of blood from these stones. Every scrap of power. _You_ saw nothing here but I made it into a kingdom and an army. I've planned so long, Vanyel. I have killed so many in the night. And I watched you." The words turned soft and Vanyel's hands ran cold over the stone. "I chose you to be my match, my equal. I spoke to you in my dreams...did you hear me?"

Vanyel felt Leareth's lips brush his face. He couldn't move, couldn't even shiver. "I - I did -"

"I know you did. This is a destiny I chose for us. I watched you fight in the far south and grow ever more powerful, and I knew you'd come to me one day. We will be the night and day over our kingdom, Vanyel. Don't you see it?"

He forced himself upright, and spat his reply close to Leareth's face. "I'll not be your thrall."

" _Thrall_?" Leareth stepped back elegantly, feigning incredulity. "I want no such thing from you. You came to me willingly, and have I not been _good_ to you? Have I not kept you well, and offered you every luxury this land can give?" He raised a hand, and laid cold fingers against Vanyel's neck, drawing their bodies close again. "I warmed your bed with my own body, and you would accuse _me_ of making you thrall? Would you deny that I brought you pleasure?"

The stabbing shame in him twisted. If only he could deny it -

"I ask you for so little. All I want is the darkness in you. I know that you've felt it - I've seen you kill in anger, so many times. Don't you want to share the power of the blood we will shed together?" He shuddered, memories filling his mind - _splintered wood and a mind used like a puppet - the herbman and the bandit child -_ He tasted blood in the memories, staining everything that had ever been pure. He remembered death writhing in his mind. Leareth's hand stroked against his face, and he felt like it spread that death-energy where it touched, corruptive. "Darkness thirsts in you, Vanyel. That's why you came to me, and that is why you agreed to join me. You said _yes_. You can't refuse me now."

Leareth's lips pressed gently against his own, so cold they burned, igniting all of the shame and despair that twisted inside of him. _I can't refuse him. I have to. It's just words. It's just magic. I can't do anything -_

He leaned backwards, winter wind lifting his hair.

_I could jump._

He felt it all happen. _So easy._ A foot on the parapet, a step off a belltower. One moment, full of rage and magic. _Take it all away. No more touching, no more blood. Let the sky have me._

Leareth's hold on Vanyel slackened, their lips parting by a breath. It was as much freedom as his impulse needed. _One step back and -_

He felt the wind wrap around him, and a echo-voice calling to him from inside it; _"You can do better than me."_

His mind slammed back, breaking through ice deep inside and rolling up sputtering and furious. _No, damn you. I won't do your filthy work for you, and I won't give up til you're dead._ He felt spell-lines sever around him, a clinging web of a thousand strands - and as each one snapped it ran back to its blood-source.

He breathed in slowly as he absorbed each pinprick of power. _That was me. You took it from me. You used my own blood to make me want to kill myself?_ His anger was renewed with his power, and his channels throbbed. Leareth stared back at him with equal malice.

"You have heard my final offer, Vanyel, and no one could ever make you a greater offer than mine. I want you to rule all of Velgarth at my side, as is your due." The words were black threads pulling at him, catching on shards of ice. "But with or without you, I shall rule."

_Will you? Can you? I don't know any more. You didn't even try to push me. You just wanted to see me give in. Maybe you're just obsessed, or maybe you need me._

Leareth looked through him, and beyond, his black eyes reaching past the forest and beyond the snowline. "This is the end of Valdemar's peaceful winter sleep. I am ready for war and I will march south a night hence, with you at my side...or not."

Vanyel heard what he didn't say _\- or at your feet, or under them?_ "I see," he said with what calm he could muster. It was a bleak reckoning; Leareth wouldn't have spared him even a breath of time if he didn't think he could make better use of it than Vanyel could. _He'll keep hounding me, with charms and mindtwisting and traps - he doesn't believe I have a chance -_ He forced the fear and the anger and the ice all together, dark and jagged inside his mind. _I'll show you yet. When I'm through with you you'll wish you knew how to die._

"Consider your choice well, Vanyel. It has consequences."

He would have replied, but heard a sound from far below; a thin howl on the wind. Leareth's eyes narrowed. It must have been far, and should have been inaudible; perhaps the belltower amplified the wilds-song. Vanyel felt like it had crept into his ear, a stowaway from the beyond.

Leareth beckoned him ahead onto the stairs. The door slammed out the daylight behind him but the sound remained, a prickling inside of his head as he descended past the cold and silent bell. He readied his shields for an attack, physical or magical, but Leareth kept his peace and his distance, and the armsmen at the foot of the stair merely escorted him back to his tower.

 

So that was it. Vanyel was still trapped, and Leareth's army was going to march right over him and destroy everything he'd ever loved. He'd had all of two minutes to be alone to dissect the situation when the servants returned to his tower with food - rich and saccharine delicacies, fruits he didn't recognise, bloody meat in slivers speckled with spices. At least there was a loaf of bread.

He did his best to avoid watching Crow; he thought there was a new tremble in her awkward gait, but she played her part in the same graceless manner as the other two slaves. She didn't look at him once, but as she walked by him, she raised her hand palm-forward in a clear gesture of warning.

He froze, and waited for the enthralled to file out; she hung back from them, silently closing the door between the reception room and the stairs - and she leaned against it, shaking with palpable fear.

He stepped as close as he felt he could without frightening her further. "How much of this is poisoned?" he whispered.

"Only the bread," she replied. "There's a sleepwort in it. I think he reckoned you might not touch aught else."

 _He would have been right, too._ His knees felt suddenly weak, the clamour of food-scents making him queasy. If his tormentor was trying to make him distrust every instinct and impulse, he was succeeding. "Thank you." He hoped she knew how sincerely he meant it. It was one hell of a risk to take just to keep him from being drugged. "You need to get out of here."

"No I don't. He really _can't_ watch now, can he? And they don't see nothing when he's got their heads like that." He could believe it, after that taste he'd had of Leareth's mind control - every thought had been blanked from his mind except for the insinuation of death. A smile split her dry lips. "They don't give a damn where I am."

Her expression was too familiar to him; he'd seen it on the Border, and in Hardorn, and every other time he'd risked himself to end someone's captivity or bespellment. Freedom's first taste was often the headiest. He would never interfere with what someone chose to do with it, even if they were trying to throw their lives away. "Please be careful." It was all he could say, and he could tell that the thought hadn't yet crossed her mind.

She tightened her hand around the wooden tray she'd been carrying, and swallowed hard before meeting his eyes again. "I said unkind things to you before. I'm sorry for that. Wasn't thinking right."

He gave her a small, awkward smile. "Unkind, but not unwarranted. I didn't give you time to think right." He pulled two elegant wooden chairs out from under the table and sat, wondering if there was anything he could bring himself to eat. Some of the vegetables looked normal enough. "Come, now, I can't eat all this alone." 

She sat beside him and examined the arsenal of forks that one of the maids had arranged as if for a dinner party; she took the second largest and immediately began attacking the meat. Her hands, he noticed, seemed much younger than her face or her demeanour - he tried to imagine what she'd look like if her eyes weren't sunken, if she didn't reflexively stoop her back. _She's not many years older than -_ He severed the thought with a tiny stab of despair. _Twenty-five at the outside, probably younger._

It took a few minutes of picking at food before she was ready to speak to him again; Vanyel was surprised by just how good it felt to even hear the voice of a real human who wasn't trying to break his mind. "I been doing some thinking since then." She looked around nervously. "Are we the only free things here?" 

"You, me, and him." He didn't say the name. "As far as I know, the rest are all kept in thrall." He'd yet to hear any of the servants or soldiers here speak to another. It might be forbidden, or impossible. He knew there were thoughts inside them still, turning in fast and hazy circles, but they never spoke unless Leareth spoke to them, paid no heed to anyone else in the world except Leareth and whoever he'd assigned them to notice. _He makes us all lonely_ , he realised. _He did it to me for years. He separates us, silences us, kills people we love, taints us with his touch and pollutes us with suspicion, charges us to watch each other. Every human want gets twisted and used._

"Why did you pick me? What'd I do?" She wasn't hostile, but she was wary.

He sighed. "It was pure opportunity. It was the first time I'd seen someone alone. Once I realised I was able to free you, I couldn't leave you in thrall to him."

"Thank you." Her words sounded oak-beam rough, splintery but unyielding. She had one arm resting above her belly - _I know_ , he thought. _It's too little too late to stop what he's done to you, and I'm so sorry. I should have been here sooner. Valdemar should have known of him sooner, but we didn't._ "I'm part of your plan now?"

 _There is no plan. You are my plan._ No, he wouldn't lay such a burden down on her, but he knew from here on he would need her much more than she needed him. "Only if you choose to be. Mostly, I just need to know more about what's going on out there. You talked about the mages and the wood, but I didn't understand."

She frowned. "You must know of it. The mages aren't doing as he says no more, no matter what he does to them. They seen something out there that's worse than he is - and then two patrols didn't come back, and that made 'em worse. They won't scry for him, won't do nothing. They says it's watching them all the time and crying out at them. They don't even sleep in these walls no more."

 _Huh?_ He tried to fathom it all. _Watching them all the time? That was me. It could easily have been me. I invoked Truth Spell and now every time they tap a line they get covered with_ vrondi. _And if they all feel like she did and I do - hunted by Leareth every damn moment - it wouldn't take much more of a push to break them. Oh gods, I_ did _it._ It was the first spot of light he'd seen since he entered the tower and he tried to stop his heart racing. It really wasn't much - Leareth still had his own magical resources plus an entire army - but at least his invasion would be one of mostly steel, not spellfire. Maybe, maybe, Valdemar could stop him. "What do you mean, crying out?"

"Like some beast with the whole wind for its voice. You've not heard it in here?" He _had_ heard it, he realised, up above the belltower. "I heard one of them say to him that it come to take back all the blood they took." Fanciful - hedge-wizards were often superstitious - but the sound warranted it. Just thinking of it seemed to set his bones shaking with it again, even though he'd only heard a bare whisper of it. "Another one said it was the mountain god, but, I don't know about gods." He grasped the sentiment all too easily - Leareth ruled so cruelly that it was hard to believe there was a god of this land, but she wouldn't risk saying something so impious out loud.

"The god of the temple?" She nodded. "What's his name?"

Her voice dropped low. "We call him Wendwinter on the Valdemar side - like of the forest. I never heard speak of him up here, though."

"You're from Valdemar?" He wasn't too surprised - the border here was barely marked, and both people and language drifted from one side to another with the seasons, but her dialect was clearer than most of the other far-northern voices he'd ever heard.

"Aye. I came over here after the bad winter two years back - by the end of it there weren't enough sheep left to keep me in work. There'd been talk about a lord over the border, so I left my two little boys with their nan and came up here to find a place." _Talk that the Guard hadn't heard, or hadn't paid heed to. We need Heralds riding circuit up there._ Far too late for that now. "I must have missed a lot of news from home," she pondered.

He filled her in on the few happy events he could think of - the alliance with Rethwalllen, Karse's spiritual crisis and consequent ceasing of hostilities, and Treven's marriage to Jisa. Like every other commoner he'd heard speak on the matter, she was impressed with the match. "Better that he wed one of ours than some foreign girl with a name no one says the same way twice. Is she really the King's bastard?" He nodded - it wasn't something he intended to stop lying about. "A bastard queen." She granted him another sudden smile. _I need to tell Jisa that one -_ He was jarred by the normalness of the impulse, and by the stark unlikelihood of it ever coming to pass. _Oh gods, but I'll never see her again. Or anyone I loved._ It was for the best, he knew - he wouldn't want them to see what he'd become.

They talked a little more of mundane things as he scraped foul honey-mixtures off delicate cuts of meat and fish; Vanyel knew enough of sheep-farming that he well understood the struggle for pennies that she'd left behind. Privately, he wondered if the bitter winter she spoke of had been engineered by Leareth as a recruitment scheme. She spoke a little about her croft and her family; he felt her fear at speaking of the people she truly cared about, but as she spoke it seemed as if she were remembering them for the first time after a long forgetting. Simply listening made him feel more human than he had in weeks. And he liked her; she had the manners of a farmhand, not a servant, with no compunctions about how she spoke to highborns or Heralds.

The far north had always been hard; hungry in its bad years and ridden with bandits in its good ones. Rendan's was a name she'd feared for years. "The Dark One, though. He was a story from my nan's time, or could be before. She said he'd been killed by one of his own - another mage, or a few of them. But he doesn't stay dead. He comes back." Her face was white and more worn than ever. "I thought that was, just, part of the story she told. Didn't know it meant this. Nobody knew."

Vanyel didn't know what that meant but he knew what she needed to hear. "You couldn't have known. It's unnatural, and I don't even know how it's possible." He, at least, had known what he was dealing with - an incredibly powerful, sadistically patient blood mage - and how much time he had to deal with it - virtually none.

She sighed. "When he's in there - when he's in your head, like everything's about him - it's hard to think how I ever didn't know what he was. Feels like I was warned, and I never listen."

 _Me either_ , he thought, and thumped his elbows on the table. "If there's anything, _anything_ , I can do that will keep him dead, then I'll find it and do it. I swear."

She shrugged, jaded. "Talk's fine. I should get all this back to the kitchens. They won't know I never went back."

He nodded, and helped her stack half-empty plates, looking at the poisoned bread thoughtfully. "I should do something with that," he decided, and tore off both of the heels and tossed them back into the basket.

Crow nodded approvingly. "Where're you putting the rest?"

"In pieces down the drain, I think." He tucked it on the side of the tray. "Thank you, truly." She half-smiled, as if knowing he was as grateful for the company as for the information. "Is there some way for you to escape this place now?"

She tapped her foot against the floorboards. "I shan't be going without you."

So she'd considered escaping - hells, it must have been the first thing she had thought of. And she'd already decided not to do it. _I can't make any choices for you._ He hung his head, and tried to see how his next move might change with two cards now in hand. "Then, please, keep lying low. Do all he says, and he won't realise he's lost you."

"That all?" She sniffed.

"And tell me if you hear more about the beast in the wood."

"You want your things back? Your weapons, maybe? I know where they're hid."

He considered it. "Best not. He'd find out and realise someone was helping me."

She nodded and opened the door gingerly, and with a cautious downward glance she descended, Vanyel following with her burden, handing it back to her by the outer door. He took the uneaten bread back from her, and watched her leave, seeing her movements return to the stiff, cowed actions all the Dark Servants seemed to make, efficiently resting her tray over her forearm and hip to open the door.

He glanced at the poisoned loaf again _\- hmm, I could keep some of it. What if I need to sleep -?_

Then outside, a voice - _"Loitering, are you?"_

He crossed the room in a crouch and and put his eye to the keyhole, and saw Crow stumbling into a supplicant's kneel, shaking her head, _no, no._ His Empathy was barred from reaching her, but her terror was clear enough. Vanyel bit his lip, and forced himself to do nothing. _Oh please, please the gods, don't let him know that you're free. Let him assume you're still his possession, don't make him_ look _, don't let him see that you're gone._

Leareth wrapped his hand in Crow's thin black hair, jerking her bowed head up to look at him. _"You're only still alive for one reason. Don't you dare forget it. Now get along with you."_

She stood up with eyes downcast, and marched to the keep door. _He's no empath, and he didn't see that look on her face_ , Vanyel tried to reassure himself. _He can't know that she's not just scared of him any more._

She was incredibly angry.


	6. Chapter 6

_Tylendel was staring at Vanyel before his eyes even opened fully. "You look like hell," he said warily._

_"I had to see you," he said, breathing hard with the effort it took to concentrate. "He - on the tower - he tried to take my mind and - I know now -"_

_"Van, what's wrong with you?"_

_Tylendel raised a steadying hand to his shoulder and he hadn't the strength to stop himself from shying; ice pressed against his back, supporting him when nothing else did._

_"Sleepwort - just a hair of it - I had to see you..."_

_"_ Van! _" Gentle hands touched his face, and he tried to centre himself on them and escape the pulsing drowsiness. He could feel the dead weight of his body far away, trying to pull his mind down with it into the murk._ Just hold on, damn it. It'll get easier as the drug wears off. _He hadn't had a choice - it was the quickest way he had to force his overwrought mind into a sleep-state and he had to talk to Tylendel._

_"S'alright, He - was trying to drug me. If I had none of it, he'd know." He shivered hard, almost as if he could still feel the cold. Another trap he'd had no choice but to step straight into. But he'd had much less of the poison than Leareth thought he had, and he was looking forward to the chance to spring a surprise or two of his own. He'd curled in front of a door that opened inward - plausible, if he'd passed out unexpectedly, and if anyone came up the tower to knife him he'd be alerted for the occasion._

_Tylendel sighed, not questioning him further. Which was fine by him, because that wasn't what he'd come here to talk about. At least fury was a good way to clear the sluggishness and the lingering disgust from his head. "He tried to lay a blood-charm on me - fuelled by my own blood."_

_Tylendel's eyes widened. "How did he draw it? Did he hurt you?"_

_"Must've taken it from my clothing when I first got here."_ I hope. _The only alternative wasn't one he wanted to think about too hard. "He took me up his damned tower and set a compulsion on me. It almost - 'Lendel, he, he wanted me to step off the edge."_

_Pain flashed across Tylendel's face - pain and the memory of worse. "Charming, isn't he?"_

_"Truly. I found out more, too - I broke the spell on one of the servants and she told me a few things. He's_ not _unkillable, but he knows how to come back from death. Somehow. That's how Rendan's father knew him - and there are stories much older than that." He knelt in the snow, staring at the translucent crust of it, not sure how to ask this of Tylendel. "I thought..."_

_"You thought what?" Tylendel settled a few feet from him, seeming a little defensive._

_"That you might understand it better than I do. Being as you know a few things about dying."_

_Tylendel wouldn't look at him, and Vanyel felt just as if he'd been stomping and kicking wet snow through everything that had gone wrong for them._ I can't help it. I need to know. _"No more than many others." Vanyel looked into the wall of ice across from them; the structure seemed stranger than ever, as if there were lights and shadows inside it, or behind it. "Haven't you danced with the Shadow-Lover enough yourself?"_

Danced? He held me, kissed me. I tasted his tears. That was all. What about you? _The Messenger felt bright in his memories, filling him with awe and sorrow and relief. He couldn't ask more of the matter, and Tylendel wouldn't tell him._

What happens? _he wondered, considered asking anyway, thought better of it - Tylendel was unhappy enough as it was. But the questions burned through him._ Did you make love with him? What did he look like, for you? Was he as kind as you deserved? What's _wrong_ with our lives, that Death seems so damn attractive at the end of it? What's Leareth doing right that we're not?

_He knew in his soul that those weren't things you asked of another. They were things he'd find out for himself, and probably soon._

_So never mind that. "If I could find out how he was doing it, I could stop him. Let's talk it over, at least." He scrawled an X in the snow with one blue-tinged finger, trying to remember how to think. "He_ looks _human, mostly. It's not like he's some kind of god...if he_ was _, he'd be doing a damn sight better than one tacky storybook castle. He'd have his own Iftel or similar."_

_"So...?" Tylendel circled his scrawl, prompting his thoughts onward._

_"She said he died - that is, that he can be killed. Mistakes kill all of us eventually -"_ like you, like me, _"- but she did say he was_ killed _, by his own people, and it makes sense, you know? That's why he keeps such a tight rein on all of them now. He could make a much better army out of people who could think for themselves and had something to fight for, but he's got a lethal terror of trusting another soul and everything he does makes his own people hate him. Point stands, he_ can _be killed, if I had the strength. But that's not_ enough _."_

 _'Lendel nodded slowly, and Vanyel chewed the inside of his cheek. He was forced to dwell on the fact that he was having this conversation with a ghost. Or a memory, or a delusion - he was talking to someone who was_ dead _, and if that was possible, who knew what else was? "If his body dies... He's not a corpse. He's Changed himself, but - I would have realised if he didn't have a pulse." His face twisted, nauseated by the thought of it. "He's renewing his physical form somehow, while his inner form goes...where? How does it sustain itself without a life to fuel it?"_

 _"Quite. So what you're asking yourself is," Tylendel prompted, as if he had somehow had to coax Vanyel this far along the trail of logic. "Where is he coming back_ from _?" He spread his hands, touching the snow with the backs of his fingernails._

I'm talking to a dead man.

_Vanyel looked around his ice fissure - heard its chill silence, as if the war above were far past now, felt the distance he'd run along it, the grey night. He scrambled to his feet, and stared at the sheer walls. Frosted, full of black shadows. He raised a fist -_

_\- Tylendel jumped up behind him and cupped it in his hand. Vanyel wrenched away, furious. "Don't," warned Tylendel. "You won't crack it and it's not worth the broken fingers."_

_"_ 'Lendel. _" Tylendel didn't even have the decency to look guilty for hiding the truth from him. "How long have you known he was out there?"_

 _"I'm still not sure," he said softly. "But I thought you wouldn't_ be _here if he wasn't, and I wouldn't be here if you didn't need me. Somebody had to find you here and keep you in one piece."_

 _In one piece? In the nether place that the dead cross, the nameless not-here-nor-there that the Shadow-Lover walks. The place where he'd seen his own death, over and over, the only place his Foresight ever showed him. Where he was caught in an ice-cage that his pain and rage had broken open, only for Tylendel to pull him back -_ "You're protecting him from me."

 _"No, gods, Van, I'm protecting_ you _from you. Go out there in anger and you won't find anything except the Abyss. You built this," he set a hand to the wall, "And it's the only thing keeping you safe right now. You hate him_ too much _and it's going to destroy you and everything you touch if you don't stop."_

_He could feel his own blood icing over from the inside now, and found he didn't care. "So what if it does? He's already destroyed my entire life -"_

_"You aren't_ dead _yet. Your judgement's not yet cast - you'll still got a chance to make it right, don't you see?" 'Lendel, even through his insistence, seemed so distant and sad - so unlike himself - and Van felt a ripple of worry disturb the foundations of his hate._

 _"No, I_ don't _. There's nothing left for me because he_ took it all _. I came to avenge_ Savil _, of all people, and you don't_ care _? What happened to you?" he asked, ice in his voice now. "Savil's family, as much to you as to me. Why don't you care?_

_"Van. I threw away everything for a family vendetta and I can't watch you do the same. I did things -" his voice became tight, "that can't be repaid. Family wasn't worth hurting you the way I did. I had to let go of it."_

_"But it wasn't even your_ fault _. Leareth planned all of it and he made you -"_

 _"The Powers don't care,_ ashke _. It was my responsibility and I damned myself with it." His voice was rough with hurt. "The Shadow-Lover gave Staven and me two options, and believe me, giving up_ everything _was the better one. We had to agree to part for good. I'll never meet him again, not in any life. I love him still and I honour his name, but our bond - what I did for it - our family... It's gone, Van. I don't have a House and home any more, because I let them ruin me."_

 _Vanyel found himself gaping. He couldn't imagine the Tylendel he'd known saying any of that. Family was_ everything _to 'Lendel, and he would_ never _blame himself for anything done in their name. He turned away, so confused he almost wanted to cry like an anguished child. All this time he'd been sheltering in the ice with a_ total stranger _. He might just as well have been completely alone._

 _"Van-_ ashke _?" Unsure words, behind him._

_"I don't know you," he snapped. "What else did you lose? What in hells is there left?"_

_Tylendel sighed, close behind him. "I lost my magic. After abusing it like that - I couldn't be trusted with that kind of destructive power any more. You know I lost Gala..." Vanyel recognised the pain there more than he dared acknowledge. "I was never even allowed to say goodbye to her, and that's penance in itself."_ Penance? So much life torn away from him, and he makes it sound like an offering? _"I've no more easy ways out; I can't be that cruel to you or anyone else who cares for me."_

_"It wasn't - I never..."_

_"Never blamed me? You should," he continued softly. Vanyel didn't turn around. It wasn't even that 'Lendel was wrong, but that he was insisting on taking it all on himself - when surely he knew that even his greatest mistakes would have come to nothing if it weren't for Vanyel's own thoughtless indulgence. "There's more, but it's harder to explain. I can't run roughshod over other people now, especially not you. I couldn't keep being the kind of person who'd pursue a bloodfeud unto death, and to be sure of it I gave up on being of any House. I'm done with privilege and honour and courage and the self-righteousness that comes with it. It's better to have nothing than to kill for what you have - I'm done believing that I have the right to kill anyone."_

_He paused, and Vanyel found himself breathing so hard he could taste blood at the back of his throat._ Who are you, monk or vagabond or penitent? What did you do to my lover?

 _"What's left?" he murmured, so near that his words shifted the tangled hair on Vanyel's neck. "I still love you. That's the one thing about me that's never been wrong, the one thing I never did enough of. I've learned better,_ ashke _, I swear," and Vanyel felt the ice give beneath his thump of recognition, and he spun on his heels and grabbed the stranger's shoulders in one fluid motion, hands tightening over the shrunken figure, pulling tight against him and pinning them both against the wall of the crevasse. A bare moment later, he found himself bowing his head against Stefen's neck and sobbing._

_Gentle, familiar arms came up around him, welcoming his tears and his trembling. Vanyel let himself lean into the embrace, and Stef sank down below him into the snow, pulling Van with him. Everything inside him was cracking and melting, a warm flame lit inside and thought slipping away from its edges. The truth was clear as water, and ran away from him as easily._

_It was some time before Stef tugged his head upright. "Believe me now?" Vanyel blinked, finding himself surrounded by strange facets of light. The ice had grown thin, impassable walls now near-transparent, showing the strange light beyond them that was almost a dawn. He sensed that they didn't_ need _them any more. "Embracing hate until it crushed me - that didn't end so well for me, and it won't for you either."_

_"I believe you," he affirmed. "You're right. I couldn't face it before, but you're right. I forgot I had anything left that was more important than hating him." Each feeling was much sharper now the ice inside was running away - especially the human regrets he'd cast aside for so long. "Stef, I as good as drove you away from me. Are we, still -?"_

_Stefen raised a hand to his face, laid his thumb over Van's lip. "You know very well I wouldn't give up that easily. Don't worry over it now."_

_He nodded, feeling the promise of a personal reckoning between them later - somehow, somewhere, whether or not he ever made it out alive. Other concerns were less willing to wait. "I still have to stop him." The urgency felt different without the killing-rage behind it - less blinkered, more like the familiar need to take on that which threatened others. "Every person he's harmed, or will harm, deserves justice, and I came here chasing selfish revenge for myself alone." Put like that, in chill sunlight, he felt as ashamed of that initial motivation as he did of everything else that had happened._

_"Revenge wouldn't bring them back," added Stefen. "And it wouldn't satisfy you. You're not_ like _that, not really. It would only drive you down further."_

_"I should have known that," he replied sheepishly. "I used to be a Herald, after all."_

_"You still are," and Stefen stroked his hair gently. He realised he suddenly wasn't panicking at Stefen's touch - he had initiated it, and right now he needed the contact much more than he feared it. "You just forgot how to be a Herald for a while because you were hurting. Remember it. And remember I love you, I believe in you."_

_"Maybe I'd forgotten that." Vanyel admitted, and realised there was a little hope in him now, as well as warmth. "I guess I wanted this to be easy -"_

_"You wanted it to work your way." Stefen grinned. "Everyone does at first, and you caught on a damn sight quicker than I did. But you can't cast your own judgement, or choose what it makes of you. All you can do is stick with what you believe in and have a little faith in yourself - maybe that's the hardest part of all."_

That's it, really. I hadn't the will to fight against myself all alone. I needed you, even while I was pushing you away as hard as I could. _Van shifted back in the dampening snow and stared at Stefen, wanting to take in every single detail; his wide green eyes and the reflected light caught by his hair, stray wisps of it falling around his face, the rough touch of his gently-drifting hands, spreading warmth wherever they touched him. Stef was staring right back, and he toed the ground beside where they sat; Vanyel was stunned, and touched, to see a clump of snowdrops poking out of the thin film of powdery snow. What could grow among the dead?_

_Many things, apparently._

_"Do you know how we can get out of here?" he asked, almost reluctant - he didn't want to leave Stef but he badly needed to finish this._

_"_ You _can walk right out," he waved a thumb at the thinning walls. Light danced on the other side, and he recalled, belatedly, that there was_ something _beyond their flimsy wall that wasn't hostile to him, something that had offered protection. He wondered if he was ready to face what._

_"What about you?"_

_"I can't help you out there." He shrugged, and in his voice Van heard a note of sorrow for the price he had paid. "I've no magic. I'll fade out to where I should be, I guess." He watched a flickering path of lights, and added, "It might be hard to be aware of this place once it's gone. Especially for me - you called up a lost part of me that remembered what you needed. I might get confused - so might you."_

_Vanyel could easily imagine that, from all the garbled hells he'd heard of in his decades of magical study, but he hoped he could at least cling on to this new understanding of the person he was lifebonded to, even as he felt the duality fading like the ice - it didn't matter any more, wasn't needed, was melting away._

_Stefen pulled himself upright, and offered Vanyel his hands. Vanyel found himself smiling - there were dark patches of snowmelt in Stefen's hair, and he was displaying his very stubbornest expression. "You could write such a song about this, you know?"_

_"Yes, but I won't. Come on now." Vanyel nodded, and he reached a hand to the wall. It held up against the pressure - just. Like a curtain dividing a room - there was a distinct_ here _and a_ there _, but the barrier between them was easily permeable...and what was more, he could feel_ something _reaching the other way. A signal. A beckoning. For_ him _. All he needed to do was reach through -_

 _He did, and it was a_ lot _like opening a curtain; he winced slightly, because the prickle of energy was of the same kind, though a much lesser magnitude, than that he'd feel from opening a Gate. On the other side, he saw little but mist, moving sinuously and dimming the dancing lights._

_He felt a much harder tremor - and it took him a moment to realise that it had been physical._

_"Van -" Stef was clutching him, shouting in panic. Far away, he felt his body scrape across the floor. The mist was so close - it was calling,_ she _was calling - he had to get back, to defend himself - and he_ had _to go on, to finish this -_

_For a moment, he hung frozen on the edge of the heart of ice, between the safe chill of his oldest dreaming, the present enemy and the distant light of change. He could tumble, backwards or inwards or onwards as impulse dragged him. Or he could choose._

"I love you," _he called, desperately hoping Stefen still heard, might remember, might wake far away and safe and know they hadn't, truly, parted for the last time in anger._

 _As he dived through the mist, he heard a warm voice from far behind him._ "Zhai'helleva, ashke."

I'll need it _, he thought warmly._ Oh gods, I'll need it.

_He wasn't dreaming any more._

 

He could still feel his body, in a dim and distorted way. Moondance had told him once that there was only one true self - projecting into the Dreamtime, or into some other plane close to one's own, only stretched that self out across two places, like a thread shuttled over a loom; the magical self in one place, the body that fuelled it in another. That was why demons were so terrifyingly aggressive. They could try anything they liked and know that you couldn't harm them at all, only chase them back whence they came and try not to let them take any part of you with them.

It was easy enough to feel his body when something was thumping against it repeatedly. He tried to blank out the sensation - he'd cast his die and whatever physical mistreatment they were making of him was now an irrelevance. _Perhaps his thralls are dragging me down the stairs before they kill me. Might give me a little extra time. If I knew where I was going -_

_:I know where you're going.:_

He spun, searching. The mist was thinning, spreading out into grids of stars. He saw her, and didn't recognise her.

 _No. No, I do. I used to see you sometimes and think I was going mad..._ He breathed in the nothingness slowly, simply looking at her for what might just as well have been the first time. 

She walked easily in the empty void, swaying towards him as if daring him to dance with her there. She was beautiful _\- or perhaps all dreamers are beautiful._ He watched her as her easy, drifting stride brought her closer; dark hair hung loose to her waist, and a smile played over her comely face as if she was unaccountably happy to see him - and _none_ of it was familiar to him but for the look in her blue eyes. _And she's wearing Whites -_ something he should have expected, but which set his mind reeling through the cloud of stars.

She stopped a pace from him. _:Finally. I've only been calling to you for days now.:_

 _:You were?:_ Was that why he was here? Had his sleeping mind heeded her, followed where he was needed? It made sense, it had happened so many times before, the call he couldn't ignore - and he felt tears streaming from his eyes as he remembered, as he tried to believe that she wasn't angry.

Her embrace was insubstantial, but so close nonetheless - soul against soul, silently offering him greeting and affirmation. _:I'm sorry,:_ he tried to tell her, feeling tears of guilt and grief break through at last, no ice left to hold them back. _:I was a hotheaded fool and -:_

 _:And I forgive you. It was my mistake as much as yours, love, and we've always been doomed to pay a high price for our mistakes. And believe me, it's not like I've been wasting my time here...:_ She looked off into the far, shadowed reaches, and it was as if he saw her intentions, lit ahead in magelight. _:Nothing like unfinished business to keep me occupied.:_

_:You found him?:_

_:I found something,:_ she confirmed. _:It took me a few days of sniffing around for blood, but I'm pretty sure this is what I was looking for, and I haven't the finesse to sort it out alone. With me, now.:_ She ran, or flowed along a line of light, mist swirling in and out of her form. He followed, keeping close to her with a tentative mental touch - the distance they crossed didn't seem to make sense, and he realised how nightmareish it might have been to try navigating this place without her, not least with half the creatures of the Abyss on his tail.

She stopped, nowhere. _:Look.:_ She indicated nothing at all. Less than nothing. His mage-senses tingled at the creeping feeling of bloodcraft close by, and he scoped around until he found its origin.

A hole with a spell on it. That was all.

 _How did he do this?_ he wondered in passing - the nether void more or less _was_ a hole so digging a deeper one inside it involved some impressive extraplanar geometry. He certainly couldn't have done it. Starwind might have been able to, but would have baulked at the twisting of the plane's natural state. He dismissed the wonder, and moved on to the next question; _what does it do?_

It sheltered, surely, and in its inner vacuum perhaps it also preserved. Above all, it must be built to keep the Messenger away. _And I do think I owe Him a long-awaited present..._ He turned his attention to the spell, and extended a probe.

 _:Be careful,:_ she warned, and he felt her energies gather behind his own, ready to catch him if the spell tried to bite. Watching his back, just like always.

He was glad of it too. It reeked like blood drenched in blood, and its innards were tight as a spring; its outside was covered in tendrils that thinned out into the void into such infinitesimally fine threads that he wondered if there was an end to them at all. He sifted through its layers, disturbing them as little as possible, finding that every chain of power just lead to another one, and another one - a cascade of blood, its rules intricate. When he finally reached its source and could just look at it - at the full extent of its operation, he was startled.

He extracted himself, reaching for her to guide his mind back to safety. _:I recognise this!:_ She frowned, looking for answers. _:From Highjorune, remember? It's a bloodline spell. It's got the same mechanisms, keyed to the Mage-Gifted within a certain bloodline. But it's not a lethal trap. It's a net.:_

_:A net? What does he do, eat them?:_

_:From the inside,:_ he confirmed. _:When the trigger sets off - whatever that is - it digs a hook in them, and...:_ He spread his hands, still thinking the whole thing was incredible. _:Back he goes along the line.:_

 _:Huh.:_ She sounded darkly impressed. _:And in the meantime, however long it takes, he holes up where the Shadow-Lover can't find him.:_

 _:We need to -:_ A shot of pain went through him - hells, he'd forgotten about whatever was happening back in the real world. _:- hells. We've got to get rid of this. All of it, and fast, and preferably without him knowing.:_

She nodded. _:If I shield around the tendrils and snip them, maybe the message wouldn't get out.:_

 _:I was going to ask if you'd do that.:_ He grinned at her. _:They gather signals from any sentient species, but are primed to only notice males. The spell's completely blind to a lady's charms.:_

She grinned right back. _:Sounds like someone else I know. Let's do this.:_

He waited until she was ready, and then reached for the dark shell with his mind. It wasn't purely magical - it was _made_ , by some means he knew not. How old was this? Could it have been wrought from a Mage Wars device, something that mortals no longer had the power to use? It was utterly dark, and capable of keeping the very plane at bay but so flimsy structurally that he could have ripped it apart with a flash and a bang - he did have a little power in reserve, and it wouldn't have taken much to light up the whole plane - but even with the seconds burning away he preferred caution. He stabbed a thin shaft of pure magic into the edge of the shell, and felt it deflate from the inside. He felt her reach for him, offering more energy - hers was considerable, and still very easy for him to draw upon - and he disintegrated each twisted piece of the dark shelter with a careful resonant force.

The spell was harder. He hadn't dispelled the one in Highjorune, only neutralised it with shields and the aid of others - one of whom had been killed by it. This one wasn't made to kill but he didn't know what its counter-defences would do to him if he wasn't careful. He reached back inside, trying to pick a fragile place to make the first incision -

\- and his head rang with pain.

 _:Van!:_ More strength, poured from her to him. _:You've not much time.:_

 _Just kill me, you bastard_ , he thought dimly. _I'm sure the Shadow-Lover will show up here for a nice chat and I would love to show him this._ He grabbed for a coil of the spell's existence, one that seemed to be a fragile and vital piece of logic. He squeezed it, heard it speak -

 _ **never to die**_ , it said. **_never to fade never the final defeat never to lose never to surrender. to live in power always._**

He _laughed_ at its cowardice, and crushed it with a thought.

From there, it was more about controlling the spell's end than directing it - loop after loop lost its purpose and failed, and he cushioned each recoil and obliterated each shard of wreckage. When it was finally gone, he could see nothing - _nothing_ , save for the lingering powdered dark in the mist - to indicate that it had ever been there.

That was it. Not a hatchet-job, but a scalpel-job. Nothing would come of it _yet_ , maybe - if he and the world were unfortunate - not for some time yet, but when it did the bastard would damn well _stay_ dead.

He looked up at her, and found her swathed in mist. _:No,:_ he breathed. _:Don't leave me here -:_

She seemed to hold back visibly, stiffening; the mist around her was thinning again. _:I'm sorry. We've seen through our last mission together. He let me stay long enough to do His work, but now...:_ She sighed, and reached for him again. He held her tightly, as if she would fly away if he let go. He choked out a sob, feeling it echo in the barren place inside of him that used to belong to her.

 _:I love you,:_ he told her, feeling absolutely desolate.

 _:And I love you. You brought me pride and honour, and I'm damn sorry that one mistake too many means it's over. Just remember - look at yourself,:_ and he did, and found that _he_ wore Whites too. Had he always, here? _:You_ are _a Herald, and you can trust your own conscience from now on. We did what we were born to do and more. Please remember that for me.:_

 _:I promise,:_ and this he _knew_ he'd remember, come what may. 

_:Go quickly,:_ she urged. _:There's a fight left in you yet.: _He grimaced, feeling too pummelled inside to even think of it, but he couldn't bear the thought of letting her down. He faded back as she faded out, sensations returning one dim inch at a time - limbs numb, bruises setting on his legs, his neck, his head. Through the pain, he tried to keep feigning sleep.__

__In this world, things were _not_ going to plan._ _


	7. Chapter 7

Vanyel _hurt._

He hurt in so many ways that it was hard to catalogue them all. He cast his awareness over his body - lying face-down on something hard - and though he found numerous aches and abrasions none of them felt dangerous except, maybe, the buzzing weight at the back of his skull. That _might_ have been the aftereffects of the sleepwort, but it might be something worse. The main source of pain, he soon realised, wasn't physical at all - it was the sickening feeling of blood power surrounding him, like acid on his mind.

He noticed this at about the same time he noticed that he was naked, and sincerely regretted waking up at all. 

Terror gripped him in its jagged teeth, but he shook it off hard and breathed again, almost surprised to feel the strength of his determination underneath it. _I already_ won _, you fool. There's nothing you can do to me that will save you. Kill me, and you've got lifetimes-worth of enemies who can finish the job after I'm gone._

That established, he forced himself to keep perfectly still while he figured out what in the seven hells he'd got himself into. 

He wasn't alone. From the slight shuffling of cloth and the whispers of feet on the floor, there were several other people around him. He was cold, and he could feel the cold now, a vicious draught from a door left ajar somewhere else in this open space -

And the blood-taint so thick it was hard to breathe around it. 

Realising it frightened him anew. _His altar. I'm lying on his damned altar that he stole from a god and corrupted for his own power. He's going to sacrifice me._

And the attempt to drug him surely meant that Leareth intended to kill him slowly.

What to do? What in hells could he do? He was surrounded by enemies, his life was already forfeit and if he made a single _move_ he'd be butchered. And no one knew he was here. No one could help him.

 _I can't cast - he'd know. Is there anything I can do?_ He thought again of that god, whose sanctuary would soon be defiled by his blood; offered an apology for that stain, and a prayer - not for himself, but for all those who would suffer if Leareth reached Valdemar. _I can't stop him...oh please, if I could stop him..._

"Mages." The voice was now familiar enough to grate, and it held more open malice than it ever had when speaking to Vanyel. Leareth was close to him, standing on his left, speaking over his body. "I brought you here to talk to you about consequences."

There was no response, only the silence of the enspelled.

"Perhaps you know a little of this man, of this Vanyel. I have been watching him for," he paused, emphasising his next words, "a very long time. I sent him messages. Invitations." _Murders._ "And he came to me." The feigned lightness in his voice was sickening enough, but he felt a hand touch his head, and almost shouted in panic. "But sadly, he came only to lie to me and abuse my hospitality. I offered every pleasure, and he threw them back in my face."

Leareth jerked his hair viciously, and Vanyel forced his jaw and eyelids to go slack as Leareth raised his head to the audience, and blessedly lowered him down a second later. "I am displeased. I was lead false by Vanyel. He offered me only pretenses of faith, and used me cruelly in return. But I think Vanyel can still be of use to us - as a demonstration. There are consequences to displeasing me."

He heard the soft scrape of a knife being drawn from a sheath.

"Winter has been long. I thought perhaps you have forgotten the rewards to be gained from sharing in my power." _Does he use that line on everyone?_ "If you wish to stand with me, to serve me in battle, there will be many more such rewards. But for those of you who are too _afraid_ to raise your magic in my name -" The blade kissed the back of his neck, drawing a line up to his hairline.

A demonstration. Barely a cut, but it stung out of all proportion to the pressure. He felt helpless under its touch, unable to move away or even scream. Another leech-blade? He tried to focus on what it was _doing_ to him. Not leeching. Hollow. A conduit. It was a tool of violation, crafted to take blood.

"Well?" Leareth continued, and Vanyel sensed the compulsions evoked by the words, writhing mental tendrils. The audience weren't puppets; mages had to control their own senses just as Leareth's soldiers had to control their own sword-arms. But they were driven to obey Leareth's every word.

Vanyel's work, his vast shield of watchers, had driven them back.

Blood dripped down his neck, and as it trickled onto the altar it _sizzled_ , raw power dripping into the stone like hot oil into a firepit. His power - he felt it slip away into that tainted place where it mingled with so many others. So many. If this stone spoke to him, it would scream as a thousand voices, and one of them would be his own. _Take back the blood they took -_

There was a sound on the breeze.

It was unearthly. Not human, not animal, part of both. It was _more_ than sound - it was like murder in his ears, a vicious promise, and it was close and threatening to come closer.

" _Shut that damned door,_ " snapped Leareth and he heard a soldier jump on his words, and the heavy wooden door of the temple thudded shut. The sound was gone. The _intent_ remained, lapping up Vanyel's terror and feeding on it. _No. Whatever it is, it's the_ enemy _of my enemy. I've nothing left to fear from it._

And it had distracted Leareth - Vanyel opened his magical and mental sight for an eyeblink, assessing the company. Leareth. Six mages - all masters of their craft, all as tainted by blood as Leareth was. Two soldiers standing by the courtyard door. He'd beaten worse odds - but only when he'd had a weapon, and some good leather armour - and her.

_But I can't let her down, I can't give up, I can't._

"Now," said Leareth. "If you stand with me, I would have you share a taste of his power, and of his secrets. A toast to our great journey south, and surely a key to unlocking Valdemar's magical defences. Which of you is still loyal to me?" He paused, and Vanyel sensed he was looking for a target. "Oled?"

"Sire?"

"I had chosen you to come with me on my journey. Or perhaps you would rather remain here, and serve as a channel for my magic...?" It sounded like a punishment duty. It also sounded viciously abusive and highly effective for extending Leareth's power. _Hells, there's no end to his cleverness or his cruelty._

"S - sire, they are watching me. They -"

Leareth snapped his fingers and Vanyel heard a wicked hiss, felt the same fire that had raged through his own hands only days ago shining red against his eyelids. A fire that sucked people dry. He smelt flesh cooking to cinder, and tried to breathe steady, tried to use the new moment of distraction -

He mustn't cast, but he could break. Not the mages. He would do nothing for the corrupted mages. He reached his mind back, with as much stealth as he were able - he _knew_ how this worked now. He loosed one spellbound soldier, then the other.

It was a huge risk to both himself and them, but anything - _anything_ \- that might tip those odds against Leareth, that might make enough chaos to let him do _something_ , was worth it. And he'd never met a former thrall who wouldn't sooner die free than live under a blood-mage's hold.

Leareth recovered his tenuous temper. Vanyel didn't dare look, or do anything but continue to fein sleep; but he did loosen his empathic shield. _I doubt he can see it, and if he does he'll just think that I'm weakening, and I need to know what they're doing -_

The soldiers were very shaken - too shocked to do anything to attract Leareth's attention. Vanyel hoped desperately that they stayed that way until he found a move to make - he couldn't bear to see them die in a fingersnap of fire, but at the right moment, some hesitation and chaos inside the powderkeg of the mages' paranoia -

\- if there could be a right moment. It didn't seem likely. He was grasping at one straw at a time, still sinking, still feeling his remaining strength drip away.

"Anyone else?" hissed Leareth. The bladepoint touched his back, drew carelessly downward - so sharp it didn't hurt until it tore, and he felt it pressing deeper, scraping his thin flesh down to the ribs. He could only hope his smothered gasp was taken for a sound from his drugged sleep. The chill point danced again - a sigil, a seeking, drawing life-force inside itself - and he felt blood run cold down his spine, strike hot on the stone. Nothing he could do. He stifled a helpless sob, feeling tears of suppressed pain join the blood-slick under his face. _He's going to kill me -_

The knife left him. He felt a drip against his back, his own blood falling back to him from its swollen inner hollow. A hand on him again. Caressing wounds open, sickly blood-slick, stroking down to his thighs - between them. The knifepoint followed as he knew it would, tasting sensitive flesh, scratching the far limits of his silence.

_How long is he going to torture me? If I move - if I scream - will he end the misery or just prolong it?_

"Helga, will you drink this power with me?"

He felt a stab of disgust from one of the two men at the door. He didn't know whether to count it a victory or an escalation of risk. _No. No._ He heard stumbling feet, a woman walking up to the altar with shaking knees. "Sire."

"You will serve me with great honour," Leareth told her, prophecy and demand. "Take his power and cast for me. I would have you scry on the high meadow." A soft-spoken request with death behind it.

He felt magic moving, felt the frightened mage form the structure of a watching-orb between trembling hands - felt her raise it, drop one hand to his bleeding flesh -

Magic flowed, and he ached as he felt it ripped away from him, and the touch-heightened Empathy showed him her world of creeping horror. _Vrondi_ \- planar spies, swarming over the line of power, scaring her out of all proportion to the threat they represented. _Leareth made them_ used _to feeling watched and invaded all the time. You damned fool, look what you gave me -_ The channel ebbed in uneven, barely usable waves, but somehow her spell held together, filling her eyes with visions that no one else could see. "It's - enemies -"

Vanyel chose her moment of panic to reverse the flow of empathic information for a split-second. The wrong feeling at the right time - and the gods knew he had enough wrong feelings to throw at her, all his hurt and hopelessness - and they might weave with the vision and the _vrondi_ and the bestial voice and her dread of her master -

She screamed.

He tried to absorb as much of the recoiling energy as he could, and the force of it bruised his throat above his amber mage-focus. No matter; if he was to have a chance to use _any_ power at all, as much at once as possible would be necessary. She fell against him, but Leareth evidently seized her, holding her up by a curled hand to her neck. "What did you see?"

"An army. Hundreds. Blue banners..."

"What addled your useless mind?" asked Leareth sweetly, and Vanyel heard her gasp - and heard her breath rattle -

Her corpse settled across the back of his thighs, and he felt sticky blood, black with power, run between his knees and sink into the stone. _Now it's five-to-one, with two heavily armed mostly-innocents at the back and a corpse hanging over my knees. Vast improvement. So what the hell did she see?_ Could he trust her words at all? Surely not. Surely he'd fed her a distant hope he held, of the Valdemar Guard somehow springing to alert and scrambling a huge force to march to the Ice Wall - it wasn't _reality._

"Now surely one of the rest of you still has the wits and the thirst for power to step up here and -"

The sound resonated low in the stones. Below them, all around them, _inside them_. If Leareth tried to speak over it, he failed. One of the soldiers at the back cried out and Vanyel's heart clenched and Leareth spun on his heel in fury.

Close by, a door opened, and the room filled with choking terror. The dagger fell from Leareth's hand, its fell charge spilling on the floor.

Vanyel couldn't have moved if he wanted to. No one could. He heard other doors swing open, and the unearthly noise bloomed louder and filled the air with dire threat and layers of predator-scents. He was caged, completely, in the flesh-creeping terror of a preybeast - but then he felt a deep alarum, a cry for aid from the part of his soul from which he might least have expected it, and it somehow drew him clear of the sound's charm.

He raised his head to face the door and his eyes snapped open, and he looked into a dream.

 _No. How can you. Why would you. What in the seven hells are you doing?_ His mind dove through nested questions, burning through each in an instant until he reached; _what can _I_ do?_

He gathered his power, staring in shock at the company that had flooded the room. More _kyree_ than he'd seen in his life, Crow and another four robed servants, and three Guardsmen whose faces he recognised - every one of them howling or singing a cacophony of tones, adding to the hair-raising, hideous noise - and there in the centre of them all, unarmed, hands empty and spread in concentration, fur cloak inside-out and hair hanging matted and a set of pipes about his neck just as if he truly were some feral godling, Stefen flooded his soul into his song.

It wasn't _possible_. 

His empty eyes found Vanyel's, pleading for him to act. If Vanyel had an advantage over Leareth and his mages, it was that he was accustomed to feeling bewitched by that unearthly beauty.

It couldn't last. Stefen had bought him seconds, at most. He reached mentally, and found Hyrryl reaching back, plans shared wordlessly and instantly. The rest, they could risk leaving until after those seconds were spent but Leareth _had to die_. He stabbed his mind towards Leareth's shields, beating on the edges and looking for - yes - a valve, cruelly clawed, that he'd readied to absorb Vanyel's energy into his reserves. _There!_ He formed his power into a spike and _twisted_ it through, into the blood-hungry maw in which physical and magical were one and the same, rending it open wider, feeling Hyrryl adding her force to his. From here, they could rip all of Leareth's shielding apart.

The chokehold of Stefen's power faltered and he felt a scrap of awareness wake in Leareth's mind. 

_No!_ Vanyel reached for his focus, pulled back what little he had left and flung a line of energy over their lifebond, praying that Hyrryl could do the rest. Could she? Stefen swayed on his feet and redoubled his efforts, wavering on circular breaths, his face colouring from the desperate effort. It wasn't enough - Stef was burning his power down to the raw channels, and Vanyel felt him narrow his power, holding his focus on Leareth alone. He fumbled with the shields he'd set on Stefen, extending them and wincing from the strain on their structure but needing to cover as many of his allies as possible before the mages came to their senses.

He'd barely absorbed what was happening beyond the play of Stef and Hyrryl and Leareth - he felt shielding and flesh rending, other _kyree_ mages putting power to work, humans moving in to kill, and now fire spat and dug its way through cracks. He had too little energy and too much need for it - the shielding, Stef, the breaking of Leareth's defences - and he dug down through his focus, tapping the node only moments before he had nothing left for Stefen or himself. How much longer did Hyrryl need to rip the shield-structure apart from its root -?

She _bayed_ , baring white teeth to her enemy, and Crow leapt from behind her.

He recognised, distantly, that one of the knives she held was his own. The other was a plain kitchen cleaver. Stefen's sound swallowed the words she screamed, absorbing each volley of fury and each claim for revenge, claiming reparation in blood. He saw Leareth sink under Crow's fury, and in his last moment Vanyel thought he saw a cunning gleam in those black, dying eyes.

He hadn't the strength to risk giving chase into the void. He truly didn't have to. _Go, damn you_ , he thought. _Go run to the other side. You have many enemies waiting, and nowhere left to hide. You just try to fight off the Shadow-Lover, why don't you?_

His mind sank, still feeding energy to his shields and not up to a damn thing else. He saw Hyrryl leap away, feeling her strange magic coil around her body, felt her jaws clench in the guts of her next target with the force of a steel trap. He felt the last mage die, felt Stefen's impossible song fall away and a _kyree_ turn on the cowering men at the back of the room - "Don't hurt them!" he cried.

He felt Hyrryl's understanding, heard her call her pack together with a growl. He dropped his head and closed his eyes, and a moment later he felt the soft weight of Stef's cloak thrown over him, and the dead mage's foul corpse pushed aside. "Van?"

"What did you -?" It was a story they'd spoken of, what seemed like long ago now. Bards of legend, who could _control_ people with their song. A late-night what-if that they'd never even tested. It was a stupid, desperate ploy to walk into a pack of blood-mages with. And they hadn't been shielded against it, because _no one_ shielded against the Bardic gift, because it _wasn't a weapon_. Stef had hung his life from that thread of the impossible, and he had won.

"Shh. We need to go alert Captain Roka and Herald Orsha and signal that we've taken over. I think I've enough left in me to keep the thralls calm, unless his army all pile up the hill at once. Van," and his voice hitched, "I'll get you to a mindhealer if I have to comb the whole of the north for one, I swear."

A hand rested gently on his head and he expected hurt, but heard Stef's gentle humming and found he couldn't feel pain at all. Only weariness, and awe for the senseless courage he'd just witnessed. He needed to get away from the blood, and the altar - he tried to sit up, saw Crow sat on her knees with a blade in each hand looking around her in a state of some shock, and retched at the sight of the mutilated body between them.

 

He let Crow lead him belowstairs, clutching Stefen's cloak tight against himself, and she settled him by the kitchen hearthfire, returning to him after only moments with clean blankets and a plain black robe from the airing room. He'd rarely been more grateful for anything. She tossed her two knives into a basin just as if she'd used them to trim a deer, and she laughed at herself around her tears. "Should I give it you back?"

"No." He shook his head numbly. "Keep it." He didn't want to touch the thing again. He looked around the room, and found it eerily normal as keep kitchens went, but for the metallic blackness of the three inner walls, and the rough stone of the mountain on the fourth. In the floor by the middle of the fourth side there was a peculiar gap. "Is that...?"

"It were a drain for the scrubbing-water. Lot smaller, too. Comes out on a slope of the mountain. I hung a few bits of fresh meat right from it and sat there singing a song from over the Border." He almost laughed. A sacrifice, a righteous one, as the northern folk offered meat and song to their gods. "I reckoned the old god might pay me a call."

"He's not a god, I assure you." Stefen was not even a great believer in gods, though this wasn't the first time he'd made use of other people's piety. Childhood nights spent sheltering under temple awnings had given him that cynicism.

"So he said." She smiled a bit. "So he tells me he's been trying to get in here all night now, and I says to him what was what, and that _wolf_ of his says she's on it. Next thing was, the kitchenfolk - they were just ignoring my weird ways, I knew they would - the wolf loosed them and they all get that confused way, and he's singing up to them, not the fearful song but something right calm. And the stone bends like it's paper, and I tell them to pull themselves together and lift the grate out with me. It's steep out there - them wolves can scramble." She eyed the hole again, as if worrying about attracting unfriendly lupine guests who were less skilled at warping rock.

"They're _kyree_ ," he explained. "I don't know what they're doing here - they don't trouble themselves much with humans." Something else he'd have to get an explanation for later. For now, he had little energy left to ask for them.

He asked her the way to the belowstairs washroom; he had cuts that needed cleaning and blood to wash off his body, not that that would be enough to make him feel like it was gone. It was there that Hyrryl found him; she was weary from untangling broken thrallbonds, but determined to heal him while his wounds were still fresh.

She did explain, without him asking. _:You did not tell me that you are of K'Treva.:_

He sighed, Mindspeaking back to her because it was honestly easier than finding his voice. _:I didn't feel like much of belonging to anything. Stef told you that?:_

 _:Aye. The Singer was very afraid of us, at first. He knew us only from a Tayledras tale you told:_ She grinned, if that was the right word for such an ample display of teeth. _:We found him and his human allies at the site of your battle. He conquered his fears well,:_ she added approvingly.

More than well. Stef, who knew nothing of magical beasts but stories, Stef who'd barely seen combat, Stef and a _kyree_ warband? It was unthinkable. He slipped into stupor as she healed him, scrabbling for his dream but finding only wisps of feeling and convictions that might as well have been cloud-castles but were still true. _Oh 'Lendel - Stef - I -_ and it didn't make sense but it _did_ and he couldn't bear it, not even the hope that there was anything between them he hadn't rended and ruined.

 _:Hyrryl,:_ he murmured when he sensed she had finished mending the flesh of his neck and his back. _:I beg you, if you have any strength left, speak to Crow after you leave me.:_

_:She of the knives?:_

_:Aye. She bears the Dark One's child, unwilling. I don't know what she would have of it.:_

Hyrryl tilted her head, replying in pity and understanding. _:I shall ask her will.:_

_:Have you a mindhealer? I think she needs -:_

She gave a throaty growl. _:The Singer asked that. No, but I think his human allies send for one, or more. They will have much work here.:_ She padded away silently, seeming deeply weary but not yet spent of kindness. 

 

All he needed now was a place to rest, and finding the kitchen full of people and amiably hungry _kyree_ , leaving the way they'd entered to make forays into the wilds, he slipped away to the open cells where the servants had slept, and curled himself up on a thin straw mattress. He didn't sleep, exactly; it was only battlefield rest, half-aware and alert for night-sounds and information. He heard comings and goings on two feet or four; he heard human voices, talking and sometimes sobbing. Stef's, sometimes, the gentle music of him speaking to another, just too far away for his words to be heard. Vanyel realised that while his wild flight from what fate had intended for him and caused mistakes and bloodshed and pain, it had perhaps led to something better for the people around him. _Not that anyone can simply go back to being their former self any more than I can. Leareth Changed everything...but we're alive._

Everything grated together - his heart felt raw and vulnerable, devoid of its protective ice and unstable in its freedom - like an animal accustomed to a cage. He hadn't thought past killing Leareth, had no idea if there was any kind of life left to him. Maybe he'd be left alone - 

Panpipes trilled nearby, and his hazed mind filled in the lyrics automatically, deep memory feeding in to his immediately wakeful consciousness. _Shadow-Lover, lead me in to light._

He pulled himself half-upright and greeted Stef before he could reconsider it. Everything was dim, lit only by thin morning-light from a high window-grate much further down the hallway. "I brought you something to eat," Stef said, letting the pipes fall to his neck and setting a wide wooden cup down beside Vanyel.

The soup was very simple; grains and shredded meat flavoured with salt and a few flecks of dried herbs, floating in a thin broth with maybe a little goats-milk, decidedly food cooked for scale rather than substance, but it sufficed to clear his throat and settle his innards. "Thanks," he said, and realised he needed to add, "And thank you for coming after me. There's no words for how brave that was." Stef might just as well have walked cheerfully into the hells for him. Long ago, he'd been moved to conviction by seeing someone take on a beast that far outmatched them for no more than the slim hope of saving another. Vanyel felt small at the thought of it - he was undeserving of such courage from _anyone_ , least of all someone who he'd pushed aside cruelly without so much as an apology, someone who he had nothing left to offer to.

"I had to do something," Stef replied with a tired smile. His voice was hoarse, as well it might be. "You've taught me that much. If I didn't try it, I couldn't have forgiven myself."

"How?" he asked simply.

"Desperation, really. One of Leareth's bandit patrols happened upon us while we were heading into the mountains. I was straight-up terrified and I just, I sang at them and made them feel it. And they stopped dead. Hyrryl was fascinated with it and got me to experiment a bit after that, and I talked to some of the Guardsmen who'd been stationed here awhile and it all got a bit theatrical - I realised that a lot of the _kyree_ had some kind of energy to them and I could give the sound intent even if it wasn't all coming from me, and more voices, more chaos in it - it _sounded_ pretty unsettling, and it seemed like that was working." He smiled briefly, a moment of pride. "When we found out how many of them there were, Hyrryl was sending far-rangers ahead even as we called up the whole Guard behind us to clean up the mess, and they said that the dark army was running scared. Easy to sneak by when they hid at the slightest growl." He looked concerned for a moment. "I know it's not alright - making people die helpless and scared - but I thought, whatever they did to punish me later, it would be worth it if I could get to you."

Was that a compunction he just heard? Stef had, truly, changed, and he assured him, "It's no less right than any combat magic, and much worse would have happened in the war you prevented. But great gods, you scared _me_ witless. Don't ever do that again."

Stef smiled at that, but it quickly faded. He was simply sitting near Vanyel, legs crossed and fingers playing over the ends of his pipes, seeming - _no, projecting, he's so good at that now_ \- a calm as clear as winter air. Beneath that, he could almost see words turning in Stefen's mind, and found himself jumping to the harshest, truest things Stef might be preparing to say to him about what he'd done.

"Van," he eventually said. "I came to offer my condolences for what happened to Yfandes - and my apologies. I loved her, and I feel honoured that I had the chance to know her as well as I did." Stef's calm slipped; behind, a raw wound. "We found out when - well, I knew something was wrong but I thought it was just me _knowing_ that I'd hashed everything up and sent you away from me at the worst possible moment and feeling torn up about it. I'm so sorry..." Tears beaded at the edge of Stefen's eyes, and Vanyel felt like a roughly cut line of daylight was opening somewhere inside himself. "Herald Orsha showed up at the Guardpost the day after you left. She was riding circuit a half-day south of the Border and her companion felt Yfandes drop out of the web. A few of us rode north right away and," he dropped his eyes, and Vanyel saw tears land on the pipes in his lap, making the softest of music even as Stef's voice rose and his control slackened. "We - we were - building her cairn when Hyrryl found us and - filled us in as best she could. I was," and their eyes met again, "More afraid than I've ever...Van, I thought I'd never - never even get to tell you I was _sorry_ , and even with everything else - fixing that still seemed like what I most needed to do. You - you don't have to forgive me for staying behind, I'll understand if you can't forgive me for it. But if you can find it in your heart, I..." He trailed off, twisting his hands together and looking at Vanyel with the same pleading, the same love and loneliness, he'd shown on the first night they'd spent together.

Vanyel wished desperately that he could stop his own heart from pounding against his chest, but he couldn't, he'd forgotten how, and he whispered, "You did the right thing." He heard Stef's splutter and felt he had to elaborate. "I'm very glad you weren't there when we were ambushed. They would have killed you, or -" He looked at Stefen - worn and tearful, rail-thin, seeming much older than he truly was and yet much more fragile. _No, hells no, if those monsters had laid a hand on you -_

"Van," and the forceful calm was back in his voice; Stef's Gift, deployed as instinctively as if this were any other waking nightmare he'd ever soothed Vanyel through. "I wasn't there. _I am here_ and I swear I'll do anything I can to help you -" Vanyel shook his head, caught between the devil-memories and the encroaching ocean of Stefen's sympathy. "Hyrryl said - that whatever went wrong for you we're _still lifebonded_ and I could - heal your heart, if we willed it. She told me how the ambushers had wounded you." 

The pain in his face, the caring, was more than Vanyel could bear. He felt himself shaking all over, and wasn't sure if he still knew how to breathe. Shame smothered his mind into suffocating panic - _he knows, he knows, he_ thinks _he knows, I can't deal with this this oh Stef oh 'Lendel_ and he thought of being held in the snow and _needed_ it so much he didn't care how little sense it made, but he _did_ care that Stefen shouldn't be led false about what he had done. He took a great gulping breath, knowing this could be the last thing he ever said to _the love of my life._ "You _don't_ know, I -" He struggled to admit his betrayal but he had to. "Stef. I let Leareth sleep with me."

" _'Let'_?" Stef's voice was gentle but still had force enough to take Vanyel aback. "Great gods, I _know_ you. You never 'let' a man anything, you _give_. And sex not freely given is just rape, and I won't hold you complicit in it." _He knew_ , Van thought desperately. _He knew, and he came for me anyway_ \- He tried to steady his breathing again, and he dared to look into Stefen's eyes. Dark green in the thinly filtered daylight, full of love and tears and empathy. "You've done nothing wrong by me, _ashke_. Not a thing." The word shook him, and he gasped, his dream-'Lendel and his real Stef jarring together in the same place inside his mind. "I didn't mean to -" Stef said quickly and Van hushed him with a wave of his hand.

"I love you too," he explained, the words difficult and heavy, feeling Stefen's forthright declarations warring against the barbs of shame inside him. "I didn't think you'd ever call me that again. I didn't know you could still - love me or want me..."

He felt fear threaten to close over him again, and Stef offered him another buffering of calm. "Well I do, you fool, but not as much as I want you to be happy and in right mind, and I promise, I'll be as good a friend to you as I know how until you've got there. But I love you." He spread his hands, helpless. "That's never going to change."

They let themselves fall back into silence and Vanyel tried to take in Stef's words and his feelings as best he could. Friends with promises - he could deal with that, and indeed, he _needed_ that.

"May I play for you?" Stef asked after a while. Van nodded in gratitude; he was finding speech hard and knew touch would most likely be unbearable, and Stef seemed to know that, but he felt like he needed his love's presence to hold his world together. Stef raised his pipes to his lips; Vanyel recognised one of Stef's own lullabies - Stefen had always loved dreamscapes and goodnights and lullabies, and he played this piece with a gentle solemnity that belied the daylight outside.

He sank back down to his bed, letting the music lap over him like a warm and moonlit sea, feeling everything Stef had woven into it - all that patience and hope and compassion, and his heart reached out unbidden, warmer than he remembered it could be. He was teetering on some edge between sleep and silent tears when Stefen paused, and whispered, "I've had the strangest dreams, you know?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's more comfort in the epilogue, if you want to click onward through the series button and read it. I posted it separately as it really doesn't fit too well with the rest. XD Either way, thank you for reading. Crit and other comments are welcome.


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